Museum List

While Sigalit Landau’s exhibit at the MoMA may be the biggest coup for an Israeli artist this spring, several other Israelis are also getting celebrity treatment. The venerable art dealers at PaceWildenstein open one of their Chelsea galleries to Michal Rovner. The show, titled “Michal Rovner: Makom II,” is the second part in the artist’s “Makom” (“place”) project, which she began in 2006; her new work is a four-walled structure made from stones taken from Israeli and Palestinian homes. Rovner built the structure with the help of both Israeli and Palestinian masons, and it may signal a rare hopeful tone in Israeli art. — PaceWildenstein, 545 W. 22nd St., (212) 989-4258. Feb. 13 – March 15, 2008.
Two other contemporary Israelis will have works on

view at The Jewish Museum. Mor Arkadir shows her video “Oil/Water-Mother/Daughter,” a 14-minute documentary taken from a road trip with the artist, who is secular, and her religious mother. The other work, also a video installation, is by Ori Gersht, an esteemed artist who made his name as a war photographer in Bosnia in the late ‘90s. Since then he’s been making lucid video shorts that have been shown at the Tate in London and many of the world’s most sought-after galleries. His latest video, “Pomegranate,” references a 16th-century Spanish still-life painting by Juan Sánchez Cotán and depicts a ripe fruit shot by a single bullet. The video is shown in slow motion; the pomegranate represents the Bible, Jewish law and the Middle East. — The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., (212) 423-3200. Both videos show from March 9 – June 22.
One more promising Israeli-born artist is featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial, which opens on March 6. Omer Fast, born in Jerusalem and just 36, has been causing a stir at least since 2003 when he unveiled his video “Schindler’s List?” in Germany. (He now lives in Berlin and New York.) That work featured interviews with extras from Spielberg’s film and showed the Hollywood set the filmmaker built next to a real camp in Poland. It also showed tourists visiting Spielberg’s set instead of the dilapidated real camp beside it, thus raising questions about Holocaust fetishism and the commercialization of memory. In another show in New York around the same time, Fast displayed a film of interviews with Israeli soldiers. The English subtitles were sometimes misinterpreted or distorted to cast doubt on the military’s mission. Now at the Whitney, along with 81 other artists selected from around the world, Fast will display something new, as is required. — Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., (212) 570-3676, March 6 to June 1.
Israel gets big play this year for another reason: The nation’s 60th anniversary. The Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust showcases the historic work of the rarely recognized photojournalist, Paul Goldman. Born in Budapest in 1900, Goldman immigrated to Israel in 1940, taking many photos during the state’s early years. Many were well-placed in the world’s leading newspapers, but published without his byline. Not one to self-promote, he eked out a hard-earned but meager living until his eyesight failed him in the early 1960s. He died penniless in Israel at the age of 86. “‘To Return to the Land...’ Paul Goldman’s Photographs of the Birth of Israel,” attempts to reconstitute his noble work and name. — Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 36 Battery Place, (646) 437-4200. Feb. 17 – mid May.
L. Alcopley, an Abstract Expressionist painter, met fellow Abstract Expressionist, Herman Cherry through a mutual friend, Jackson Pollock. The two of them later befriended the sculptor Reuben Kadish in the early ‘50s, and together the three Jewish artists forged an indomitable friendship that lasted their entire lives. Their work, each a significant contribution to the “New York School” that emerged in the 1950s, was actually quite different. Reuben was mainly a sculptor; Alcopley who worked in bold, colorful strokes; and Cherry an Abstract Expressionist too, but decidedly less defined and more “nervous” with his brush. All three artists, born in the early 1900s and dead within months of each other in 1992, are subject of a new show at the David Findlay Jr. Fine Art Gallery in Midtown. The show is titled “Triad.” It opened earlier this month and closes near the end, on Feb. 23. — David Findlay Jr. Fine Art Gallery, 41 E. 57th St., (212) 486-7660.