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Larry Abramson
Artist Name: Larry Abramson
Larry Abramson (born 1954) is a South
African-born Israeli artist. Larry Abramson was born in Durban, South
Africa. In 1961, he immigrated to Israel with his family and settled in
Jerusalem. He studied art with Yona Mach at the Hebrew University High School
and devoted much time to painting. In 1970, he signed the High School Seniors
Letter protesting the Israel government's foot-dragging on the subject of
peace. In the early 1970s, Abramson studied art
history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1973 he studied a Foundation
Course at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. Art career In 1975, he began to work in printmaking. He
became an instructor and curator at the Jerusalem Print Workshop, where he
worked until 1986, and began exhibiting in Jerusalem galleries. His work in the 1970s and 80s quoted from art
history as a tool for critical reflections on art. This was particularly
evident in "Anatomical Painting" (1980-1983), "Nevo"
(1984-1986) and "Column" (1988). This series relates to a mound of ruins
near Kibbutz Tzova, a site which was painted a decade earlier by the
artist Joseph Zaritsky. While Zaritsky ignored the Palestinian ruins found
on the site and thus abstracted the landscape, Abramson painted the view
realistically and then defaced it. By "seeing" the ruins of the
Palestinian village, he criticizes the Israeli point of view which seeks to
erase the Palestinian identity from the appropriated territory. In 1984, Abramson joined the teaching staff of
the art department of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and
Design in Jerusalem. In 1992 he was appointed head of the Fine Art
department, and in 1996 he founded and headed the Bezalel Program for Young
Artists (Master of Fine Art). From the 1990s, he published many essays on the
link between art history and the political and social significance of art.
Major works from this period include "The Return of the Black Square"
and a series of drawings, "The Pile" (2002-2004). In May 2002 Abramson published in the journal
Studio an article entitled "We Are All Felix Nussbaum", in which
he raised the problematic relationship between art and history in
the post-Holocaust era. In 2005 Abramson mounted an exhibition of works
under the name "The Pile" which included charcoal drawings of piles
of construction debris, relating to the issue of representation of ruins in art
and the figure of Jewish-German painter Felix Nussbaum. This series was
exhibited at the Felix Nussbaum Haus Museum in Osnabrück,
(Germany) and at the Chaim Atar Museum of Art on Kibbutz Ein
Harod in the Jezreel Valley. In 2010 an extensive retrospective exhibition
of his work was held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Education 1972 Art History, Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Jerusalem Teaching 1984-92 Bezalel Academy of Art and Design,
Jerusalem Awards and Prizes 1978 Beatrice Kolliner Prize for a Young
Israeli Artist, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
2021 Go, The New Gordon Gallery, Tel
Aviv Selected Group Exhibitions 2022 Metamorphoses: Replication and copy in
Israeli print, Jerusalem Print Workshop 2005 "The New Hebrews – A Century of
Art in Israel", Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
Larry Abramson Givon Art Gallery, Tel Aviv By By Nuit Banai / ARTFORUM The title of Larry Abramson’s recent exhibition
“1967” inevitably evokes the Six-Day War, which took place in June of that
year. The two works it included raise questions about the ideological
conditions that made this campaign conceivable as a national endeavor as well
as the implications of the decisive geographical expansion following Israel’s
victory. At the same time, thanks to Abramson’s sustained exploration of the
tensions between figuration and abstraction as they intersect with the genre of
landscape, the show was firmly grounded in an art-historical investigation of
the ways in which pictorial idioms perform locally while maintaining broader
legibility. Fifty-two sheets of newspaper saved by the
artist’s father during the charged months of May through July 1967 serve as
both support and surface for 1967 (Ha’Aretz), 2011–12. Arranged in the
form of a large grid, though not chronologically, the texts from the left-wing
newspaper of the subtitle become the polyphonic expression of a distinct
historical moment in which national myths about the Land of Israel were turned
into political realities. Abramson brings text and image into a productive
friction by using each piece of newspaper as a landscape upon which to inscribe
abstract and representational markings while emphasizing the role of publicity
and public opinion as means to construct a landscape that is at once
topographical and cultural (a landscape, one might add, that materially and
discursively establishes itself upon other cultures). Thus, by
applying black paint along some of the newspaper’s columns, Abramson turns this
matrix for rational discourse into formal metaphors of political tension,
whether as a series of fissured lines that meander senselessly, much like
today’s national borders, or forms that become fixed like one of the most
controversial regional monuments, the separation wall between Israel and the
West Bank. Elsewhere, entire sections of print are covered by planes of white
oil paint or alternatively buried under black paint, transforming historical
speech acts embodied in print into artistic ones enacted by the monochrome.
Here, the seminal visual paradigm of the European and American avant-gardes is
intertwined with the narrative of Israel’s postwar history and elicits
reflections about the processes of aesthetic, cultural, and ideological
transfer and reception—specifically, the monochrome’s signifying power in the
Israeli context. In Flora of the Land of Israel (after Ruth
Koppel), 2011–12, Abramson screenprinted black silhouettes of indigenous
flowers, identified in a standard botanical book from 1949, onto newspapers
from 1967 primed with white oil paint. Here, Abramson conjoins the term Yediat
Ha’Aretz (Knowledge of the Land) with the ideological mission of the
newspaper Ha’Aretz (The Land), suggesting that botany was an integral
mechanism for the transmission of socialist Zionist ideology. The Zionist dream
of building a Jewish state was diffused into every aspect of daily life,
including a national culture linked to the identification of local flora and
fauna. While other artists, most notably Tsibi Geva, have worked with this
theme Abramson’s choice of screenprinting considers the role of mass
reproducibility in the dissemination of collective ideology. Though infinitely
reproducible, each black flower appears as a singular decorative motif hovering
on a white surface that partially erases that day’s news. The Israeli landscape
is not simply a background upon which politics unfold; as both an artistic
genre and a physical locale, it is complicit in the crafting and obfuscating of
political processes. Following Abramson, we may ask whether it is possible to
continue using such idioms in Israel except critically.
At The Tel Aviv Museum of Art A comprehensive exhibition of paintings by
leading Israeli artist Larry Abramson (b. 1954). Abramson's work comprises
mostly of series centered on one leading motif, e.g., The Black Square, The
Yellow Square, Anatomical Paintings, Nevo, Columns, Beams, tsooba,
ShalomShalom, The Pile, Rose of Jericho; and the most recent series, Yechiam,
Home and Panic. Over the years, the series have accumulated more and more
images and contexts that serve Abramson as linguistic units, recurring in his
work to create each time new painterly sentences. Abramson began painting in
the mid-1970s, concurrently with the appearance of new artistic forms in Europe
and the USA, especially "New Painting," which challenged the
conventions of conceptual and minimalistic neo-avant-garde. Against this
background, as an artist challenged by art history and theory, Abramson
constructed his painting as a form of inter-era hybrid-painting; painting
which, on the one hand, refers to values from the past, yet on the other hand
offers an alternative system of ideas and concepts centered on the desire to
rehabilitate painting as a relevant medium for the expression of the
complicated reality of this place, where he lives. Payment Methods: PayPal, Credit Card (Visa, Mastercard), Bank Cheque. If you wish to send a personal cheque, please note that the item will not be shipped until the cheque clears. Shipping&Handling: All items are sent through registered mail or by E.M.S. Fast delivery service (up to 4-5 business days), depends on the weight and measures of the purchased item. You may add insurance for the item with an additional fee. Please e-mail us for other shipping methods.
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