This exhibition is the first of two exhibitions devoted to Shamir’s work, which draw a connecting line between the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Kfar Yehoshua, and the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod (where the exhibition Borders will open in May 2020, with particular focus on the artist’s landscape paintings). The common thread between all three localities is the work of architect and city planner Richard Kauffmann (1887–1958), who in the 1920s designed the town of Herzliya, moshav Kfar Yehoshua and Kibbutz Ein Harod according to the ideals of the Garden City, in which the community operates within a communal space of work and culture.
The generation of Elie Shamir’s parents, Hannah and Hillel Shamir, faithfully followed in their parents’ footsteps, physically fulfilling the agricultural and community goals of the founding generation. Shamir, in contrast, chose at first to work as an artist outside the moshav, but after a few years returned to work in a studio at the edge of his parents’ farm. His way of “returning to the land” is through the canvases. The titans of the Valley are now portrayed, in their old age, as individuals. Shamir’s observation of these figures has resulted in an intricate portrayal of appreciation and respect combined with sober awareness of the toll taken on them by years of grappling with the mundane pressures of life and with the land, heat, bureaucracy, and shifting personal and national priorities of their children’s generation.
The revisiting of the same model makes it possible to establish shared time between painter and subject. At the same time, the repetition demonstrates both the power and the limitation of art, which aims to capture fleeting life, if only for a moment. Like Orpheus, who managed to reach Hades in an attempt to recapture his beloved Eurydice, the painter’s gaze validates the past existence of the subject of his painting and asserts its continued phantom existence in the present.
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