Avner Ben-Gal

From January to March 2012 Sadie Coles HQ is presenting a series of drawings by Israeli artist Avner Ben-Gal alongside three recent paintings. 

Painting and drawing form two distinct yet interdependent strands of Ben-Gal’s practice. In both, he veers between sharply defined forms and gestural abstraction, and between everyday and otherworldly scenes. The drawings comprise recent works in blue pencil, graphite and felt-tip pen. Their importance as works in their own right is reflected by a new publication devoted to his works on paper published by the Tel Aviv Museum, Biogenetics, a title which aptly reflects the metamorphic and cyborg-like figures of many of the drawings.

Throughout Ben-Gal’s drawings, there is a sense of reality having been teased apart and reformulated in the style of a dream or a cryptic allegory. Human figures mingle with animals and anthropomorphic hybrids in ambiguous realms where space has been compressed and perspective has gone awry. In Withdrawl (whose very title expresses a slippage between significations, suggesting “withdrawal” as well as “drawl” or “trawl”), a densely shaded, grimacing head perches on the base of an unfolded pen knife which sprouts talons and drives a shakily sketched plough. 

Here and in many works, Ben-Gal presents a strange mesh or conflagration of images which recall biomorphic Surrealist collages, or the composite images and process of “condensation” which Freud described as brought about by dreams. A number of drawings collage together photographic and hand-drawn imagery: in Fresh Face in the Desert / Spitting Chewing Tobacco, a saturnine face has been printed using an inkjet printer and a plant stem drawn onto its mouth so that it becomes the head of flower. 

Within and between Ben-Gal’s drawings, semi-abstract forms are offset by visceral anatomical details. In one untitled work in blue pencil, in which where an elongated figure sits with a plate and cat perched on its lap, rigid Cubist segments and arcs vividly evoke muscle tissue. In another, a female figure sits with her legs apart, and Ben-Gal’s assertive blue pencil marks concentrate into a network of capillaries in her breasts, while her head is blotted out and merges with a background scheme of hatched geometric shapes. 

Ben-Gal’s works in black felt-tip are deliberately crude in both form and content, more closely reflecting the art informel quality of his paintings. At the same time, certain works incorporate calligraphic elements that occasionally resolve into Hebrew letters. Graffiti-style images of copulation are accompanied by anonymous tableaux and ‘portraits’ which allude to Israel and its fraught history (Veteran, Pact, Jewish Village). The recent and ancient past converge in The Night Before the War, in which a silhouetted pair of lovers (the male ‘soldier’ incongruously endowed with a tail), sketched in the style of a cave painting, evoke the mythic tale of the Corinthian maiden drawing a line around her soon-to-depart lover’s shadow. 

In contrast to the smoky and near-monochrome coloration of many of Ben-Gal’s paintings, his recent canvases are filled with almost lurid colour. Chromatic and perspectival shifts again engender a sense of reality warped by the vagaries of memory or dreams or the unconcscious. In So, what’s on the menu? a giant, flattened finger hovers across a scrawled dinner plate, and a menu is written in Hebrew on a yellow board – at once mundane and forebodingly reminiscent of the ‘writing on the wall’ at Belshazzar's Feast. A blotched black figure with cartoonish genitals crouches in the corner, in a characteristic injection of the abject into the everyday. In We Only Wanted to be Loved, Ben-Gal’s painterly marks assume a decorative aspect: a cat is shown pawing a bird while more indeterminate creatures float in the background. Faggotboy Gets a Unicycle for his Birthday combines flattened space and impressionistic images to imply a fragmented narrative; and in a graphic metaphor for Ben-Gal’s mediation of the familiar and the uncanny, a page of Hebrew script unravels into smudged marks. As Phillipp Kaiser has observed of Ben-Gal’s use of language, “writing does not supply the works with new content. On the contrary, writing speaks ceaselessly of its failure and its endless, never-to-be-concluded production of meaning.”

Collectively, Ben-Gal’s recent works form an allegory of personal and national histories, imbuing everyday and fantastical scenes alike with a disquieting subtext of abjection and violence. 

Avner Ben-gal (b. 1966) lives and works in Tel Aviv. He has exhibited internationally with major solo shows at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2009); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland (2008); and the Aspen Art Museum (2007). Ben-Gal has in group shows including The Second Strike, Hezliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Hezliya, Israel (2011); What Is Political, Bat Yam Museum for Contemporary Art, Bat Yam, Israel (2010);  Infinite Painting: Contemporary Painting and Global Realism at the Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art, Passariano, Codroipo, Italy, (2006-7); and Dark,  Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen,  Rotterdam, 2006. His work is the subject of a number of books; a was catalogue published by Hatje Cantz to accompany his 2008 show in Basel, and a book devoted to his drawings, Biogenetics has just been published by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.