Israeli Artists Caught Between Here And Home

Is the country losing its best and brightest? And is their work changing because of it?

Ohad Meromi: Conflicted about where home is.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

By any account, the artist Ohad Meromi was doing just fine in Israel. After graduating from Israel’s pre-eminent undergraduate art school, the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, in 1992, Meromi had a string of high-profile exhibits across the country. The Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, both gave him solo shows. The Dvir Gallery, a leading art dealer in Tel Aviv, represented him. He even taught a few courses back at Bezalel.

“I was doing well for myself in the art world in Israel,” Meromi, now 40, said. “Then, I felt that, I don’t know, I wanted to see the larger world. It’s a very intense and interesting scene” in Israel, he said, “but it’s very small.”

He called

Guy Ben-Ner, once a fellow teacher with him at Bezalel. Ben-Ner had recently left Israel and enrolled in Columbia University’s master’s program in the fine arts, the first Israeli to do so, in 2001. “He said, yeah, it was worth the trouble,” referring to the costliness and cultural barriers involved in moving to New York.

By 2002, Meromi was enrolled at Columbia. Since graduating in 2004, he has been represented by the downtown Harris Lieberman Gallery, closing its latest show of his “Who Owns the World?” last week. And earlier this year, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, founded and overseen by Jasper Johns, awarded Meromi one of its 12 annual grants, each worth $25,000.

“Do I imagine myself staying in New York? No,” he said. “But am I going back to Israel? No.”

Meromi is just one of many young Israeli artists who have recently moved to New York and who are unsure if they will stay. But while he has elected to stay and work here, at least for now, several others have chosen to move back. Collectively, this new generation of artists has upgraded the profile of Israeli art considerably, but it has also raised questions about the future of Israeli art more generally.

There is the philosophical: What makes their art “Israeli” now? But also the more hard-bitten: Can an increasingly globalized Israeli art scene still provide meaningful commentary on the issues at home? And then, perhaps most pressing: Is Israel losing some of its brightest talent?

Some leading curators in Israel think not. “I’m very optimistic in the fact that they’ll return to Israel,” said Amitai Mendelsohn, a curator at The Israel Museum, in an interview from Jerusalem. He has organized a major exhibition, opening at the museum next month, which will focus on the latest generation of Israeli artists. Titled “Real Time: Art in Israel 1998-2008,” the show features many of the artists who now live and work in New York: Guy Ben-Ner, Ohad Meromi and Ofri Cnaani. But even if they do not return, he said, repeating a commonly heard sentiment, “that doesn’t make them any less Israeli.”

Roughly one-third of the 40 artists represented in “Real Time” now live outside of Israel, Mendelsohn said. (A new Tel Aviv University study found that one in four Israeli academics is working in the United States.) And if there is any defining feature encompassing all the artists’ work, it is precisely their internationalism. The upcoming exhibit’s synopsis reads: The artists “try to construct their place in the world. Increasingly, for artists from Israel, this place is not necessarily in Israel. Rather, their art merges with the growing phenomenon of the global artistic village, while not rejecting the baggage of its own historical, cultural, and socio-political experience.”

Mendelsohn, like many other art world observers, cites the globalization of the art market as a new reality in general. Biennials and art fairs in cities from Miami and Venice, to Sao Paolo and Istanbul attract artists and collectors from around the world. In New York, premier galleries like PaceWildenstein, which represents American icons like Chuck Close and Donald Judd, have picked up a growing number of international stars. Last week, they closed the third solo show for the Israeli Michal Rovner, 50, who they have represented since 2005.

New York museums are also taking on the younger Israeli artists. This week the Museum of Modern Art opened a solo show for Sigalit Landau, 39, a 1994 graduate of Bezalel who still works in Israel. Later this year, the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, a Queens affiliate of the MoMA, will open a show for Yael Bartana, 37. Bartana received her undergraduate degree from Bezalel, but came to the New York School of Visual Arts for her master’s, which she earned in 1999. She now lives in Amsterdam. And this year’s Whitney Biennial, which opened earlier this month and comes with the subtitle “Where American Art Stands Today,” features more than 15 foreign-born artists from its roster of 81. Three — Omer Fast, Seth Price and Mika Rottenberg — were either born in or have lived in Israel.

“There’s a big desire for the art world to be international, and there’s no favoritism or discrimination,” said Magdalena Sawon, the director of the Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea, which represents Omer Fast and Guy Ben-Ner.

Still, some observers argue that something gets lost in the constant moving. “To the question of national identity, I tend to be of the opinion that the healthiest art is the kind that grows on some fixed soil,” said Jed Perl, the art critic for The New Republic. “One of the problems of the artist setting down their tent here for a while, there for awhile, is that they can have a one-dimensional sense of rootedness,” he said, meaning that their art might be simplistic when addressing particular national issues.

To be sure, not all the Israeli artists who now work abroad have ever addressed national issues. But for some of those who have, they have noticed a change in their own work.

For Nir Hod, 37, a Bezalel graduate who moved to New York about a decade ago, the change was intentional. “Even now, people [in Israel] are afraid to talk about emotion and beauty,” he said. “I felt like in New York I would have more opportunity, like I wouldn’t have to argue all the time for my work.” He added, “So of course, my art has changed a lot.”

In the 1990s, his most famous work featured paintings of feminized Israeli soldiers — a jab at the masculinity of Israeli society. And though he occasionally still uses the soldier as a motif, he says it is meant to address a more universal theme of hero worship. “It wasn’t about Israel in particular. It was about the hero,” he said, adding, “It was very important for me to talk in general.”

In any event, his current works, which will be exhibited at both his Israel and New York galleries, will be a significant departure. Some pieces include lines of cocaine on a large black mirror, a prison installment and paintings of two women masturbating. “It’s very heavy, but very touching,” Hod said, and there are not any obvious Israeli cues. But in a sense, he added, “it still deals with the same kind of subject [as] with the soldiers — it has a lot of drama.”

The New York art scene that Hod and his closest Bezalel contemporaries — Landau, Ben-Ner and Meromi — have entered has become even more enticing for Israelis just a few years younger. Not only have their own successes fueled a desire for the even younger ones to come to the city, but so too has the increased ease of doing so. Two years after Ben-Ner enrolled at Columbia, one of its professors, Jon Kessler, created the Israel Artists Fund for Visual Arts at Columbia, in 2003. It awards two scholarships to its master’s program each year.

Artis, created in 2004, aims to promote young Israeli artists in New York. Its founder, Rivka Saker, the head of the Sotheby’s Israel department, said that the organization’s budget increased threefold from last year and that for the past two years it has sponsored events year round, not just over a few months. (She would not disclose the actual size of the budget.) To coincide with the upcoming Armory show, which opens at the end of March, Artis has organized a show of emerging Israeli artists at the Inga Gallery in Chelsea.

“It’s giving Israeli artists the right exposure that will change things for them,” Saker said, from the Sotheby’s offices on the Upper East Side.

But it maybe a telling sign that another crucial supporter of Israelis studying abroad — the American-Israeli Cultural Foundation — strikes a bargain with its scholarship recipients. The organization, which has supported artists from Itzhak Perlman, in his youth, to Rovner, Landau and Cnaani more recently, gives half the overseas scholarships it awards as a grant and the other half as a loan. The loan component is forgiven if the artist returns to Israel. David Resnick, the organization’s associate director, noted that “those artists who do not return [to Israel] and succeed in the world at large are happy to pay back their loan because it goes to support the next generation of artists.”

Bezalel has also responded to the departures of some of its young artists to graduate programs abroad. Though the academy encourages its undergraduates to study abroad, it created its own graduate program in 2001. Ido Bar-El, the head of the school’s Fine Art department, and others interviewed, said the program was intended to bring the school in line with other prominent international art schools and to offer an alternative to the immense costs of studying abroad. (Annual tuition for Bezalel’s graduate program is about $2,000, said Bar-El, compared to Columbia’s approximately $38,000.)

Of the two other higher education institutions for art in Israel, the University of Haifa also recently created a graduate program. And, Bar-El said, there are “rumors” that the HaMidrash Art Teachers School might soon too. (Ben-Ner received his undergraduate degree there, in 1997.)

“Twenty years ago, the idea of an MFA or Ph.D. was not as prominent,” Bar-El said, and now Bezalel is recognizing the fact. And yet, Bar-El said that he embraced the globetrotting trends of today. “I believe the world is getting more open and there’s freedom for a person to travel. Personally, I do encourage them to study abroad.”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization