ORI GERSHT
CV
Ori Gersht creates bodies of work that often poetically explore the relationships between history, memory, and landscape. Through metaphor, Gersht illuminates the difficulties of visually representing conflict and violent events or histories.
Themes such as Dutch still life painting, romantic landscapes, and Nazi-occupied territory escape routes in the Pyrenees are steeped in Gersht’s bodies of work. Gersht's imagery is uncannily beautiful; the viewer is visually seduced before being confronted with darker and more complex themes, presenting a compulsive tension between beauty and violence. This has included an exploration of his own family’s experiences during the Holocaust, a series of post-conflict landscapes in Bosnia and a celebrated trilogy of slow-motion films in which traditional still lives explode on screen.
He approaches these topics not simply through his choice of imagery, but by pushing the technical limitations of photography, questioning its claim to truth. Gersht is perhaps best known for his work with slow-motion capture, wherein he produces images and video portraying fruits, flowers, and other material fracturing when stuck with high velocity gunfire.
The first project with Galleria Bianconi will be a solo show taking place in January 2022.
Ori Gersht in the studio, Courtesy the Artist 2021
Ori Gersht (b. 1967, Tel-Aviv) earned his BFA in Photography, Film & Video from the University of Westminster, London in 1992 and completed his Master of Photography at the Royal College of Art, London in 1995.
Gersht has been honored with solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2009); the Tel Aviv Museum (2012 and 2015); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2012); Imperial War Museum, London (2012), the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2013); the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio (2014); and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany (2015).
His work was included in group exhibitions at Tate Britain & Tate Modern (2007, 2008), The Victoria and Albert Museum (2007), the National Gallery, London (2012), Science Museum, London,UK,(2015), The Philadelphia Museum of Art, (2016) MoMa San Fransisco (2016), Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (2016), Getty Museum LA (2021)
His work is held by major collections including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; Tate Gallery, London; the Victoria & Albert Museum; the UK Government Art Collection; the Tel Aviv Museum of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Gersht lives and works in London, where he has been based for the past thirty years.