Michael Druks

1940, Jerusalem, Isarel - 2022, London, United Kingdom

Tower in Mountain Landscape, 1972

Original Hand-Signed Collage -
Dated 1972

Artist Name: Michael Druks

Title: Tower in mountain landscape, 1972

Signature Description: Hand-signed and dated "London, 1972" lower middle

Technique: Collage

Size: 52 x 51 cm / 20.47" x 20.08" inch

Frame: Unframed

Condition: Very good condition.


Artist's Biography:

Michael Druks

born 1940   Jerusalem

since 1972   lived and worked in London, UK.
Died in London, 2022.

Education

1967 - Art Institute, Bat-Yam
1967- The High Institute for Painting, Tel Aviv

Michael Druks, painter; sculptor; and conceptual, video, performance and installation artist, was born in Jerusalem (1940), but grew up and went to school in Tel Aviv, and (in the ’60s) became involved in dynamic theater and art circles there. Within a few years he was a success story, his work was shown in leading exhibitions, and he was acclaimed as one of the best young artists in Israel (1969-1970).

At this decisive stage in his life and work Druks traveled abroad, and after several months in Holland he has settled permanently in London since 1972. Despite his distance from the “center” of Israeli art, however, Druks has become etched in the local consciousness as a major Israeli artist, and his works have continued to be shown in almost every constitutive exhibition of Israeli art.
His work, created mainly in London, has been perceived as connecting at its very core with the nerve intersections of this place (the portrait Druksland, for example), and has been included in all the major exhibitions that have contended with challenges such as characterizing Israeli art, mapping its orientations, and identifying milestones in its development.
The list of exhibitions he has taken part in marks out the route along which Israeli art has defined its identity through a period of some thirty years, and from this perspective he is one of the artists who best represent Israeli art with its diverse orientations.

The Israeli public has indeed been exposed to his work in an ongoing manner, but has never had the opportunity to view and to gain a deeper appreciation of the expressive power of the totality of his work, which also includes a rich chapter of painting.
The exhibition and the book “Travels in Druksland” propose a broad and comprehensive retrospective gaze, which includes reconstruction of constitutive installations works and performances, films, video works and painting that have become milestones.


Michael Druks is an Israeli-born artist with a diverse practice ranging from his avant-garde conceptual works of the 1970s involving video, photography and performance, to his installation works, collages, drawings and paintings.

Born in Jerusalem in 1940, he grew up in Tel Aviv where he became involved in theatre and art circles, and by the late 1960s he was acclaimed as a leading young Israeli artist.

Druks moved to Europe around 1970 and soon settled permanently in England, where he became known for his conceptual work, and had significant solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; De Appel, Amsterdam; and the ICA, London. 


Druks has exhibited internationally in museums and institutions over the past four decades. Michael Druks: Travels in Druksland, a major retrospective, was at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod (2007); and Druksland: An Audio-Visual Retrospective at Haifa Museum (2004). He was recently represented in Atlas Critique at the Parc Saint Leger Centre D'Art Contemporain, Paris (2012); and in Contemporary Cartographies: Drawing Thought, CaixaForum, Barcelona (2012), CaixaForum, Madrid (2013). Druks's conceptual map - the print Druksland: Physical and Social (1974) - has become an iconic image in both Israeli and international art.


Michael Druks has taken part in several group exhibitions at England & Co over the past decade, including The Map is Not the Territory series (2002, 2003, 2009); Beneath the Radar in 1970s London (2010); and Wandering Lines: From Automatic Drawing to Abstraction (2012). 

Michael Druks, his recent solo exhibition with the gallery, featured early conceptual works and video together with a group of recent paintings. He was also included in the gallery exhibition Works from the 1970s and '80s in 2013.
 

Druks has exhibited internationally over the past four decades, including Documenta 6, Kassel (1977); Performance, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1979); exhibitions at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; and Cartographers, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. 
Michael Druks: Travelling in Druksland, a major retrospective, was at the Museum of Art, Ein Harod (2007); and Druksland: An Audio-Visual Retrospective at Haifa Museum (2004).
He was recently represented in Atlas Critique at the Parc Saint Leger Centre d’Art Contemporain, Paris (2012); and in Contemporary Cartographies: Drawing Thought, CaixaForum, Barcelona (2012), CaixaForum, Madrid (2013).

Druks grew up in Tel Aviv where he studied at the Art Academy and became involved in avant-garde art and theatre circles. By the late 1960s, Druks was established as a leading young Israeli artist and decided to travel abroad.
He arrived in Europe around 1970, and after a period in Holland, settled in England where he became known for his conceptual work, with solo exhibitions in the 1970s at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; The Whitechapel Gallery, London; De Appel, Amsterdam; and the ICA, London.

His diverse practice over four decades reflects Druks’s thoughts about techniques and media. He sees ‘technique’ as “merely a working tool”: when asked about his use of many different media in 1978, he replied that “the medium is the artist himself, and all the rest, such as video and drawing, are techniques.”

In the mid 1970s, Druks made a major series of works involving varied interventions with TV screen images. Using performance and photography, these interventions had subversive, humorous or politically charged results as is evidenced in Druks’s filmed performance work Playbox (1975) where he reacts and interacts with, programmes being broadcast on television; and in his photographic installation Unauthorized Biography (c1975).

Druks’s conceptual map – the print Druksland: Physical and Social (1974) – has become an iconic image in both Israeli and international art, featured in numerous exhibitions, books, magazines, exhibition catalogues and posters. This work evolved from his “geographical technique” with which he intended to provide a coded visual language of signs understood all over the world; and reflected Druks’s preoccupation in the 1970s, with borders and boundaries and their social and political implications.


Since the early 1980s, Druks has concentrated primarily on painting, making works he says are “details detached from a context” that require time and active participation from the viewer. Described by Arturo Schwarz as ‘mindscapes’, these enigmatic paintings are intended to entice an investment of time and imagination in the process of contemplating and decoding them – Druks sees this time element as incorporating “an extra dimension to a two-dimensional product”, saying that “my elusive images create the space for playfulness and involve the viewer’s participation in an active and democratic role”. He creates fictions, making images that emerge from his subconscious, although “the trigger for the picture is not the subject for the work”.

Michael Druks has taken part in group exhibitions at England & Co, including The Map Is Not the Territory series (2002, 2003, 2009); Beneath the Radar in 1970s London (2010); and Wandering Lines: From Automatic Drawing to Abstraction (2012). This first solo exhibition with the gallery features early conceptual works and video together with a group of recent paintings.


Selected Solo Exhibitions

1966        Students’ House, Tel Aviv University

1970       ‘Environment’ Billy Rose Pavilion, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

1971       ‘Sandwiches’ Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

1973       ‘Flexible Geography’ Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

‘Punishments’ Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

1974   ‘Punishments’ In-Out Centre, Amsterdam;

             Agora Studio, Maestricht and Art Meeting Place, London

            ‘Hidings, Forgeries’ Photographers Gallery, London

1975   ‘Image/Identity’ International Cultural Centre, Antwerp

            ‘Two Installations’ PMJ Self Gallery, London

            ‘Photographs and Video Installations’ De Appel Centre, Amsterdam

1976       ‘Everybody’s Own Yard’ Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

‘Simple Fractions’ Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

1977       ‘Territory – Living Space’ Neue Galerie Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen

1978       ‘Ambiguous Definitions’ ICA London

‘Incidence &  Coincidence’ Spaces for Exhibitions & Actions,  Berne

1983       ‘Screenings of Photographic Situations’ The Israel Museum Jerusalem

1987,88,90,99   Julie M Gallery, Tel Aviv

1992       ‘Works on Paper’ The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

1993       Bugrashov Gallery, Tel Aviv

1994       Beardsmore Gallery, London

2001       ‘Circumstantial Evidence: New Pictures’ Beardsmore Gallery, London

2004       ‘Druksland: Video Works’ audio visual retrospective Haifa Museum, Haifa

‘Forensic: Paint and Clay’ Beardsmore Gallery, London

2007       ‘Michael Druks: Travels in Druksland’ retrospective, Museum of Art, Ein Harod

‘Michael Druks’ Beardsmore Gallery, London

‘Michael Druks: Early Works 1965-1982’, Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv
’Selected Works’, Yair Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

2009   “Deuteronomy Chapter 1, Pictures Chapter 2”, Yair Art Gallery, Tel Aviv

2013    Solo Exhibition, England & Co. Gallery, London


Selected Group Exhibitions

1968   ‘Ten Plus: For and Against’ Gallery 220, Tel Aviv

1969       ‘Autumn Salon’ Helena Rubinstein Pavilion of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum

‘Ten Plus in the Round’ Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

1970       ‘Ten Plus On Venus’ Gordon Gallery, Tel Aviv

1971       ‘Concept + Information’ The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

1972       ‘Affidavit: Idea-Process-Document’ Gallery House, London

1973       ‘Self Portrait in Israeli Art’ Haifa Museum of Modern Art

1974       ‘Ten Years, Twenty Artists’ The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

1975        Travelling Exhibition in South America under aegis of Agora Studio, Maestricht,

 Museum of Contemporary Art, Buenos Aires; Museum of Contemporary Art Sao Paulo; Estudio   Actual Caracas, Venezuela

‘International Open Encounter on Video’ Palazzo dei Diamante, Ferrara;

 Espace Pierre Cardin, Paris

‘Ninth Biennale of Young Artists’ Paris

‘Video Works’ Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels

‘The Video Show’ Serpentine Gallery, London

‘Video Travelling Show’ Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol and Brighton

1976       ‘Photography as Art’ Gallery Grada, Zagreb

‘Time, Words and the Camera: Photo Works by British Artists’ travelling exhibition in Austria:  Kunstlerhaus, Graz; Municipal   Gallery Innsbruck; Artists Union Vienna.

1977       ‘Documenta 6’ Kassel

‘Photography as Art, Art as Photography’ travelling show under aegis of Fotoforum Kassel,

 Kassel, London, Warsaw, New York

1978       ‘Artist and Society in Israeli Art 1948-1978’ Tel Aviv Museum

1979       ‘Interdisciplinary Events on Body Art and Performances’ National Museum of Modern Art, Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris

1980       ‘Borders’ The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

‘Maps and Images of the Earth’ Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris

1981       ‘International Photography Biennale’ Vienna

‘Contemporary Artists’ Camden Arts Centre, London

1982       ‘Aart Hats’ travelling exhibition in Germany

‘The Labyrinth’ Atelier Rue Ste-Anne, Brussels

1983       ‘Tel Hai ’83 Contemporary Art Meeting’ Tel Hai

1984       ‘Eighty Years of Sculpture in Israel’ The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

1985       ‘Milestones in Israeli Art’ The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

1986       ‘The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art’ Tel Aviv Museum

1989       ‘To Live with the Dream’ Tel Aviv Museum of Art

1992       ‘Routes of Wandering: Nomadism, Journeys and Transitions in Contemporary Israeli Art’, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

‘Stitching Gordon Matta-Clark: A Selection’ Waranda Culture Centre’ Belgium

1994   ‘90-70-90: Developments in Israeli Photography in the Past Twenty Years’ Tel Aviv Museum of Art

1995       ‘Looking Up, Looking Down’ Beardsmore Gallery, London

1996       ‘Cartographers’ travelling exhibition in Eastern Europe: Museum of Contemporary Art

 Zagreb; Mucsarnok Hall of Art Budapest; Center for Contemporary Art Warsaw; Umetnostna

 Gallery Maribor Slovenia

1997       ‘Perspectives on Israeli Art of the Seventies: The Eyes of the State’ Tel Aviv Museum of Art

‘In the Light of the Menorah: Transformation of a Symbol’ The Israel Museum Jerusalem

2000       ‘Four Artists’ Beardsmore Gallery, London

2001       ‘Love At First Sight: Israeli Art from the Vera and Arturo Schwarz Collection’ The Israel Museum Jerusalem

 ‘Narrative and Other Stories’ Haife Museum of Art

2002       ‘The Map is Not the Territory, Part 1’ England & Co, London

2003       ‘Thou Shalt Make: The Resurgence of Judaism in Israeli Art’ Time for Art, Tel Aviv

‘Video Zero 1: Communication Interferences’ Haifa Museum of Art

‘The Map is Not the Territory, Part 2’ Farnham College of Art, London

2004       ‘The Fourth Ceramic Biennale’ Eretz-Israel Museum, Tel Aviv

2006   ‘Video Zero 3: Performing the Body – Live Acts’ Haifa Museum of Art

2007       ‘Mapping the Imagination’ Victoria and Albert Museum, London

2008       ‘+10 Group’, Tel Aviv Art Museum
‘The Birth of “Now”: Art in Israel in the 1960s', Ashdod Art Museum, Monart Center
’My Body, My Self: Art in Israel in the 1970s’, Tel Aviv Museum

‘Click-Clack’ The Art Gallery, University of Haifa

‘The Hidden Trace, Jewish Paths through Modernity’ Felix-Nussbaum-Haus
 Osnabruk, Germany

2009       ‘Face Inside and Out’, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv

‘Mind the Cracks!’, collages from the Museum and other collections,

Tel Aviv Museum of Art

‘The Map is Not the Territory, Part 3’, England & Co, London

2010       “Beneath the Radar in 1970s London”, England & Co, London

2012   “Wandering Lines: From Automatic Drawing to Abstraction”, England & Co,   London

 

Additional Information:


A journey through Druksland

By GIL GOLDFINE  / The Jerusalem Post / 07.05.2007

Michael Druks has weathered conceptual, video and installation art and come back to painting.

The world is full of painters who have been sidetracked occasionally by other artistic mannerisms and yet, in the end, retain their sanity and remain painters. Michael Druks is such a painter, one who has weathered the ins and outs of conceptual, video and installation art and has, in the recent past, come back to painting.
Despite his strong Israelinative origins (b. Jerusalem, 1940), Druks came to a conscious decision, following studies in Tel Aviv and a round with avant-garde theater, to make his way in the larger arena, and after several months in Holland he settled permanently in London in 1972.

His association with Israel has been on the edge, and his involvement with things and issues Israeli on a daily basis have been minimal. Although he has mounted several one-person exhibitions in Tel Aviv and is constantly included in local theme shows, he has also been a consistent contributor to institutional and solo exhibitions in Europe and the UK for the past three decades.
His transition from the provincial atmosphere of Israel to one of the world's major art centers has given him the opportunity to view the world as something of an isolationist - not necessarily through a narrow looking glass, but from a wider perspective. This extended view has over the years nurtured his inner needs and brought him back to his origins - and, in so doing, to his senses and true self.
A proper retrospective at the reputable Museum of Art in Ein Harod - initiated, organized and defined by its incisive curator Galia Bar-Or - covers Druks's career from the early 1960s to the present.
The span of works in all media provides the visitor with a complete understanding of what he was and is: painter, conceptual, video and installation artist, writer, theorist and self-styled philosopher.

I was first introduced to Druks as a conceptual artist in 1975 at Druksland, a fascinating exposition in which the concepts of identity and personality in space and time were investigated in collage, printing and drawing. Having been reminded again of Druks's mapping series in the current display, including a slew of metaphorical pictures surrounding the intricacies of political geography, I immediately was drawn to Druksland (1974-1975), a printed portrait that has become an icon in Israeli art.
The graphically designed portrait is used extensively as the seminal example of how the human body, space and cartography can interact to create a personal, social and political history lesson.

Druks constructed a planular definition of facial details in a topographic manner and labeled them, in a Tolkien spirit, "Right Druks," "Left Druks" and "Occupied Territory." Around the face are scattered the names of artists and places that, at the time, were important contributors to - or in several instances, significant detractors from - the Israeli art scene.
Before visitors are directed to three halls filled with alternate media - video, photography and conceptual pieces - they are introduced to a gallery of early paintings, assemblages and drawings from the decade between 1960 and 1970.
Across from a handful of darkish assemblages is a group of figurative canvases whose explosive use of color and reductive rendering are an admixture of DeKooning and the CoBrA modalities.
The secondary scales of contrasting viridian and orange palettes of these mischievous oils and mixed media paintings, worked between 1967 and 1970, are aggressive and resilient and project a striking, uncompromising sense of youthful exuberance. More, they contain the chromatic spirit that Druks would resurrect 15 years later.
Once presented with these early pieces, it is difficult to understand what forces led Druks down a path of conceptual and film art. The derivative assemblages and objet trouvé sculptures, constructed from bits and pieces of wood that have been left raw or painted black and burnt orange, smack of Archipenko, Kurt Schwitters and detailed extractions from the abyss of Louise Nevelson's sinister altars.

A few are the results of exposure to the constructed mannerism embedded in synthetic cubist works, especially those by Juan Gris. From the early to mid 1970s, Druks found himself defending the ideals of conceptual and performance art.
The works during this period, a manner of expression without the tools of his adopted trade, were captured in a series of photographs, video films and handwritten documents. To Stand in the Corner (1972), Touch, Awareness, Perception (1977) and Is Sony a Name of a Person? (1975) are each a magnum opus of the rational-cum-intellectualization of art during those pasty years when art was going from pillar to post in an attempt to redefine itself and, unfortunately, moved aimlessly in several mystified directions.

In 1977, Druks created a performance - first in Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany and then Tel Aviv - entitled Territory, Living Space. Playing mumblety-peg in a sandbox with another player, the jackknife kept falling and dividing an incised circle into smaller domains, and with each throw the activist's existence would become smaller and less tenable.
The allegorical insights in this work are perfectly clear as they pretend to be in his documented series To Stand in a Corner. Looking back while surveying his contributions to Israeli art, I have come to understand that Druks, during those heady days of experimentation in the 1970s, was only visiting a world of art that deep down was alien to his true temperament - one that is deeply submerged in painting, in the direct physical act of brush to canvas and of composing with color, line and shape.
Yet during the '70s, his alter ego found it necessary to follow the leads of an international style of art that, in hindsight, was merely a temporary link with today's digital explosion but which sidelined Druks's talents intermittently so he could express his socio-political emotions by harnessing messages on film and in photography.
Having come full circle, Bar-Or and the artist have filled the museum's major hall with a couple of dozen canvases and works on paper from the past 20 years. Each and every painting is charged with images that are - yet aren't - absorbed from nature, or perhaps engaged from the artist's imagination.
They are poetic compositions bordering on the surreal, displaying abstract elements and inexplicable signs and symbols that somehow seem familiar but are impossible to decipher.

Planes fold into and over one another as thin and thick lines skittle around in a nervous, wiry manner. The marvelous part about these works is that everything in them seems to be just right, solidly composed and in place, leaving little to chance. The relationship between language (the ability to describe and classify) and perception (the need to create and observe images) is not a recent historical conundrum, but a holdover from the protracted documentations of art through the ages.
In his battery of recent works, Druks takes us on a personal adventure as he incorporates into a single picture several alternate-looking components stripped down from experience and the subconscious. His incursions into a creative process in the end form robust pictures that contain all Druks wants to say visually, yet quite often nothing more than an apocalyptic arrangement of line, shape and high colour.

There is an enigmatic element that runs through Druks works of the 1990s. As biomorphic and geometric shapes are shuffled and spindly lines are used to bridge them, one's eyes are riveted to the internal structure of the pictorial design. Color-wise, Druks relies on the occasional violet shape surrounded by lemon yellow, vermilion and an electric blue scumbled onto translucent fields of diluted sand, sepia and burnt orange, contrasted by knife-like linear edges or figurative silhouettes prancing and diving into a colorful abyss.
Although Druks did not adopt the machine influences that were amalgamated into many works by Francis Picabia in the first decades of the 20th century, there are visual references in Druks's pictures to the Dada master in his use of vague anatomical fragments and palpitating rhythms of organic forms sent into motion by a series of linked, thread-like lines and negative spaces.

But Druks's appetite for the automatism of the surreal went a bit further than Picabia's machinations and pseudo-cubist compositions as the whimsy of Joan Miro took hold of his imagination, and with the Spaniard's inspiration, he began making sense out of what could easily have become pictorial chaos. Paintings from 2005 and 2006 are more reductive, less colourful and present a reverse psychological manner from extroverted declarations of the past to introspective statements of the present.
Drawn in low key rather than enthusiastically brushed, they contain a limited number of conflicting shapes and planes, and the distinction between expansive backgrounds and frontal planes has all but disappeared in favour of a fragility that is as inspiring and it is prosaic.
Expanses of watery beige and pale calamine are interrupted by sporadic scarlet, ultramarine and black contours slicing through the picture plane, trying to define graceful anatomical forms in a didactic rather than an erotic fashion. In the final analysis, one sees Druks as a committed erudite artist.

He has managed to navigate the labyrinthine twists of several media, while with great personal authority he has sustained a characteristic of self-determination. He has returned to his true passion; standing before his easel, he ably orchestrates a new, unambiguously fresh pictorial vocabulary with each new canvas. (Museum of Art, Kibbutz Ein Harod). 

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