More than any other artist in his generation, Kupferman was a man of choices. The first of these was the choice of his profession as a vocation that life forced him to endure; a choice between seclusion and a fanatic pursuit of privacy – his privacy and the privacy of the work – and his moral and professional commitments to himself and to society; a choice of the right to construct his art as a world of practice and meaning, yet leave its interpretation – or rather, the ability to interpret it – to others, virtually without any help from him. Virtually: for the man, whose paintings surrender no explicit sign of involvement, responded to the occurrences emotionally – out of profound awareness of the affinity between the present and memory.
The four “scrolls” on display represent a distinct, distinguished Kupfermanesque field, evident in the link created in this body of work between painting and drawing, between evolving experimental forms and lucid, full forms, between flow and cessation, between fullness and void, between the hesitating and the knowing hand, between active intention and submission to memory. (The first scroll is dated 1987, yet Kupferman would visit them time and again in the future). “For me,” Kupferman once said, “the scroll embraces themes, but no story. The theme is ‘the thing,’ the thing that binds the fragments.” The scroll is an evolution, the unfolding of memory into the everyday.
About a year before his death Kupferman visited the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and was captivated by the concrete wall in the foyer, the same wall that now bears his scrolls. The scrolls transform the concrete, with its smooth rawness, stains and flaws, the horizontal connections and even the way in which it absorbs the light – into a “Kupfermanesque surface.” Kupferman liked coincidences, as he called them, he liked contingency, anything that allowed for discipline and freedom, the use of active materials in the formation of his consciousness as a painter and as a human being.
Yona Fischer
Exhibition Curator
On loan from the Kupferman Collection Association, Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot
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