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Upcoming
Exhibition:
Monaco
April 25-28, 2013: Art
Monaco Fair,
Grimaldi Forum, 10 Avenue Princesse Grāce, Monaco
"In
2003, Avner Sher - one of Israel's
most successful architects of public spaces - debuted a provocative
series of works at the venerable Mabat Gallery in Tel-Aviv. It was just
a few years past his fiftieth birthday and the constrained, conformed,
geometric shapes that had marked the organized articulation of a
professional career imploded, giving way to unexplored emotions that had
lingered in silence for the better part of a lifetime.
Artists come to their moment of
revelation in myriad ways. Chaim Soutine found his masterwork in a
Paris abattoir, Dubuffet found beauty within the intuitive gestures of
children and the impaired, and, for Christian Boltanski, the anonymous
faces of the Holocaust are the object of posthumous honor and
reverence. For Sher, the inchoate, lurid and unruly graffiti found in
public lavatories goads him to create. Each scratching seemed intended
as an attack on the orderliness of public space, each scrawl a leering
bit of raucous laughter; childishly offensive and inured to
condemnation.
As a catalyst, the public washroom
is both extraordinary and banal. It also happens to be a critical
component of an architect's craft. In large-scale, complex projects
such as courts of law and shopping malls, the incidental space reserved
for personal hygiene is where people feel sufficiently anonymous to
transmit their wild protests, jokes, obscene drawings and passionate
declarations of desire. Confronted with the almost immediate vandalism
of these private spaces in his public works allowed Avner Sher to trade
the orderliness of point, arc and line for a liberated form of
expression wherein aggression, destructiveness and desire present the
viewer with an emotional striptease.
Like a tattoo etched on the body,
the burnt, scratched and gouged transgression of the visual plane tells
multiple stories. One story belongs to the artist: Avner Sher carries
the unresolved burden common to many of the Holocaust survivors' second
generation. His parents survived Dachau and so he grew up with people
whose markings where artless and horrific. The tattoo was a visual code
from his childhood and youth, and remains an important reference for
understanding the works on the artist's terms: the surface is violated
and, once spent, the violating force may reveal beauty. And this story
of beauty belongs to the viewer: we are present at the expression of an
inner life that is full of anticipation for a better world. We can
divine ancient oriental art, unmistakable architectural elements, and
evidence of the internet generation. The surfaces hint at our strength,
our will to create wholeness and our aspirations for a normal and full
life. To quote the artist: "my works are an expression of hope in the
face of chaos."
For
additional information: Johan Westenburg
iotawestenburg@gmail.com
Avner Sher's website:
http://www.sher-art.com/
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Avner.Sher
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JEWISH AND
KOSHER MONACO:
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