This exhibition aims at setting up a brief historiography of the body as it is perceived, represented and manifested by Israeli artists from the 1950s until today. On view are works from some of Israel’s most known artists together with a selection of contemporary Israeli artists residing in Berlin. The works of Moshe Kupferman (1926 – 2003) and Lea Nikel (1918 – 2005) are our starting point, chronologically. Like many of their contemporaries they were engaged in an abstract discourse avoiding any direct representation. Kupferman’s paintings are an on-going process of marking and erasing, thus constructing a timespace machine whose generator and scale is the basic move of the painter’s hand. In Nikel’s case the body is transfigured into abstract forms. Possible figures, emotions and inner situations are shaped into colors and spatial relationships.
