Avner Ben-Gal
10 July – 23 August 2008
For his second solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, Israeli artist Avner Ben-Gal presents a series of paintings of deep imaginative consciousness. Shades of toxic green, orange, and grey dominate his pallet creating smoky and unnerving scenes through which figures and motifs emerge: a tentative soldier, a tottering old woman, a grinning wolf-like creature. If at first characters seem menacing, time in their company reveals more affable aspects and a scorched giant bird develops into a guardian force.
In Ben-Gal's paintings themes and motifs recur, across exhibitions and across series - dusty landscapes, burning buildings, animals. Shapes are also repeated and in these new works triangular forms appear alternately as a hazy pyramid, a letter, or jagged background structures. In turn, jumps in scale mean that an envelope containing a letter that begins 'Dear Granny' is rendered monumental and against a dark background becomes a kind of tombstone. The surreal prevails as elsewhere an egg-shaped fruit under a pale Northern-Light sky sprouts roots and an idiot-savant monkey executes a mathematical equation. Questions of painting and illustration are posed as text appears in Ben-Gal’s work more than ever before, in letters, in a picture showing the Ten Commandments tablets inscribed with ten ‘NO’s written in Hebrew, and in another painting a building is labeled ‘BANK’.
While Ben-Gal's work with misty shades, empty landscapes and phantom figures clearly taps into collective memory of recent events, he never works directly from the mass media sources suggested by his pictures. In his studio there are no photographs, rather images are internalised and reformulated layer by layer into a powerful mixture of figuration and abstraction. His paintings are populated by animals throughout, rich with anthropomorphic connotation. Temporally ambiguous, emotional and atmospheric, Ben-Gal's paintings are testament to the ability of painting to uncover the shadowy planes.
Avner Ben-Gal’s work has recently been the subject of a solo show at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland, 2008, The Aspen Art Museum, 2007, and The Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, 2009. Ben-Gal has been in various group shows, including at the Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art, Passariano, Codroipo, Italy, 2007, Boijmans in Rotterdam, 2006, and as part of the Venice Biennial, 2003. His work is the subject of a number of books, most recently a catalogue to accompany his 2008 show in Basel. He lives and works in Tel Aviv.
14 September – 15 October 2005
Avner Ben-Gal’s elusive and moody paintings present landscapes and rural views with a desolate edge, rendered burnt and barren, by harshness of climate or by damage reaped by man. Warehouses and barns go up in flames, harvests are poorly planted and meager in their rewards, and shady looking farmers struggle to make an impact. The depictions of marine and animal life emerge from the painterly surface; an iguana rests atop a plasmatic stone in a burnt out abstract desert setting, basking in the sun in all its mimetic glory.Ben-Gal’s preference is for somber, muted tones. A hazy veil appears across the surface of many of the paintings, pressing us to bring the image into focus and decipher its open-ended content. The implied narratives marry the content of fables with the harsh reality of propagation. They evoke the structure of dreams or hallucinations, as tangible elements knit together to form a worryingly unresolved picture of a land and its inhabitants in transition.Ben-Gal’s paintings involve abstraction, on the verge of mannerism, depicting landscapes and still lives of bones, sex organs, fruit, vegetal matter and ashes. The paintings shift between intense narratives and painterly concerns, the ethereal quality of some serving to enhance the intensity of others. Some works suggest imagined scenes and scenarios, while elsewhere a prophetic strain emerges, as Ben-Gal contemplates the threshold between dream and fable.
This is Avner Ben-Gal’s first show at Sadie Coles HQ. Ben-Gal lives and works in Tel Aviv. His work was included in Clandestine, curated by Francesco Bonami, a section of Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 50th Biennale di Venezia, 2003.