ARTSESSION: Contemporary Israeli Artists from Russia. This catalog is the first venture of its kind: we present the ...

ARTSESSION: Contemporary Israeli Artists from Russia. This catalog is the first venture of its kind: we present the works of forty-seven artists who came to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

Softcover

22 x 29 cm

127 pages

fine condition

This publication serves several goals, one of which is presenting these Russian-speaking artists together, despite the wide variety of media, techniques, styles and genres in which they work. Notwithstanding their differences in age, education and region of origin within the Soviet Union, there are common denominators that unite them all. Foremost are the Russian language and the Russian culture in which they were brought up, with all its associations and allusions. Further, they share their complex experience of life in the Soviet Union – a country so completely different from Israel – a totalitarian and imperial country, large in size, with different values and a different environment; a different physical world, a country with a different light.

The artists represented here are professionals with a solid art education background who have achieved success in their countries of birth as well as in Israel. Almost all of them have had numerous exhibitions (some artists could not even recall them all) but only the most important of them are listed in this catalog. Most of the artists in this book, however, remain practically unknown to Israeli art patrons or to the art establishment.

It is not the purpose of this introduction to blame anyone or any set of institutions for this situation. But it is important to try and find out why it is so. Why, after so many years does a “wall” still separate “Russian-speaking” artists from Israeli artists? This separation exists not only between the artists, but generally between immigrants and veteran Israeli citizens. Thus, the second and third goals for the publication of this catalog are to introduce these Russian-speaking artists to a wider public, and to explore their work in a well-presented compilation that also explains the reason for their marginal existence.

Presently their existence truly is marginal, in spite of the fact that the mass media, politicians and representatives of the Israeli art establishment continuously spout the mantra of “the immense contribution of Russian aliyah to Israeli culture.” The questions then are: What is the contribution by Russian-speaking artists to Israeli art, and, indeed, is there a contribution? What is the place of Russian-speaking artists in the Israeli art establishment, and, do they, in fact, have a place there? It would seem that no one knows and no one is trying to find out. While the influence of the art of various waves of immigrants on Israeli art in the first half of the twentieth century is well known and documented in detail, the same cannot be said about the end of the twentieth century.