Nogah Engler & Ori Gersht
On Reflection
10 October - 29 November 2014
Private views:
Thursday 9 October, 6-8pm
Saturday 18 October, 6-8pm
Andrew Mummery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition
that brings together for the first time the work of artists Nogah
Engler and Ori Gersht. Engler’s paintings and Gersht’s
photographs reflect on how art addresses themes of history and memory.
Nogah Engler’s paintings contain echoes of the landscape around
the town of Kosov in what is now Ukraine. Between 1941 and 1942 almost
the entire Jewish population of the town and the surrounding area
were murdered following the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland.
Among the very few survivors were Engler’s father Gideon, then
6 years old, and her grandfather Baruch, who wrote two accounts of
the massacres. In 2005, having grown up with these accounts and her
father’s memories, Engler made the journey to Kosov in search
of the places where her father and grandfather had hidden to escape
the death squads. The paintings that have resulted from this visit
are reflections on the meaning of landscape and memory, the complex
relationship between past and present time, and how the work of art
can mediate between the two.

Nogah Engler, Red Line,
2014, oil on panel, 60 x 120 cm.
The overall impression given by Engler’s paintings is that we
are looking at fragments of memory, both personal and collective.
Her works contain open and enclosed spaces and she employs combinations
of different perspectives that mix near and far. These elements function
both formally and metaphorically. There is a careful juxtaposition
of areas full of realistic detail with more abstract gestures, paint
that is both broadly and meticulously applied, painted surfaces that
shift and change in density and degrees of opacity. Engler has talked
of her interest in the ways that modern technology has widened the
range of ways in which we can look at and experience things and this
has affected how she depicts some of the individual objects in her
paintings. At the same time she remains fascinated by historical landscape
painting and its influence is clear on both the technical and formal
appearance of her work. The act of looking is key to Engler’s
paintings, and this applies to the objects themselves as well as to
those who view them. Striking, in the most recent paintings in the
exhibition, are rows of human figures seen in profile, witnesses to
some thing, or event, that is not disclosed to the viewer of the work.
What, we are being asked by these paintings, is the meaning of testimony?
How can visual art bear witness to, and reflect upon, the darkest
and most tragic events of human history?
Ori Gersht employs photography and film as his chosen media, but his
work has always exhibited a fascination with painting and art history.
He is very interested in the differences and connections between the
ways in which a painter and a camera create and record reality, and
in his latest series of photographs he uses cameras and mirrors as
devices with which to explore questions of reflection, representation
and perception. .
Ori Gersht, On Reflection,
Material 06, 2014
Archival inkjet print mounted on aluminium 150 x 120 cm
Edition of 6
The new photographs had two starting points. The first was a visit
to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2013 where Gersht became
fascinated by three early seventeenth century paintings by Jan Brueghel
depicting vases of flowers. The second was when Gersht started focusing
his attention onto the flat surface of a mirror. This mirror is reflecting
what appears to be one of Brueghel’s paintings, but this image
is an illusion - not only because it is seen in a mirror, but also
because what is being reflected is not a painting, but a replica,
meticulously crafted by hand from artificial flowers, of the bouquet
depicted by Brueghel. This replica is a comment upon the nature of
the original painting in which Brueghel chose not to depict wild flowers,
but cultivated ones. All the flowers are shown in their most perfect
form and the depiction of the simultaneous perfection of so many species
that bloom in different seasons and in far flung geographically locations
- a fantasy of a desirable, but never attainable reality - is an assertion
of the power of art and craft, alongside the power of science and
technology, to remake the world of objects. It also undermines traditional
notions of time and place.
Having placed the replica of Brueghel’s floral bouquet in front
of a mirror, Gersht next positioned two hi-definition digital cameras,
focusing them on two different optical planes: one close up on the
glass surface of the mirror, the other - from a distance of three
metres - on the reflection of the vase of flowers. The mirror was
then broken using either hammers or small explosive charges, shattering
it into a maelstrom of flying fragments of reflective glass.
In contrast to the laborious and meticulous processes that led to
the creation of the replicas of the bouquets in Brueghel’s paintings,
the compositions that were captured by the camera at the instant of
the shattering of the mirrors were rapid and unpredictable. The use
of the two cameras allowed Gersht to capture simultaneously two contrasting
views of the same event. Because of the different focusing points
and the limited depth of field, each camera captured an alternative
reality, questioning the relationship between photography and a single
objective truth. The final photographic prints simultaneously embrace
rigorous and painstaking craft and the mechanical instantaneousness
of the digital camera. Gersht raises the question of whether the camera
records, or creates, reality. What appears to be real here is merely
a reflection and its shattering is so instantaneous that the eye,
without the aid of the camera and the flash, cannot properly see it.
It is only made available to us through the mediation of optical technology.
The work of Ori Gersht has been described by the critic David Chandler
as a meditation on the poetics of fragility. In his latest series
we are reminded that all images are transitional. They show us nothing
more – for certain – than the absence of the object of
representation.
Nogah Engler and Ori Gersht both understand that a work of art has
multiple orientations to time and history. It is temporally unstable
and points back and forwards at the same time. The art historians
Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood have argued that, “No
device more effectively generates the effect of a doubling or bending
of time than the work of art, a strange kind of event whose relation
to time is plural” (1). Walter Benjamin proposed
that otherwise forgotten moments could be recovered from oblivion
and reintroduced to illuminate current historical situations and that
there can be a dialectical interplay of temporalities in which “what
has been” and “now” suddenly come together in an
image that reveals higher historical and even objective truths. Both
these ideas find a strong manifestation in the works of Engler and
Gersht.
Nogah Engler was born in 1970, Ori Gersht in 1967. They both live
and work in London.
1 Alexander Nagel and Christopher
S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, Zone Books, New York 2010 |
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Back to exhibitions

On Reflection
2014
Places That Were Not
2010
Time After Time
2008
Click here to download a press release in pdf form
Please scroll down for installation views
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Nogah Engler, Bare Feet,
2014, oil on panel, 149 x 148 cm

Nogah Engler, Bare Fruit,
2014, oil on panel, 50 x 50 cm

Nogah Engler, Circling,
2014, oil on panel, 150 x 200 cm

Nogah Engler, Gathering
(Falling Shadows), 2014, oil on panel, 60 x 80 cm |
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