Moshe Gershuni.
No Father No Mother September 13, 2014 - December 31, 2014
Neue Nationalgalerie

Moshe Gershuni (1936-2017) was one of the most important Israeli artists. His existential work – an ongoing project spanning more than 40 years – is uncompromising, and his production of paintings, drawings and sculptures leaves plenty of room for association. At once sensual and conceptual, emotional and critical, authentic and well-staged, Gershuni's works overcome contradictions and fuse historical commemoration with the cathartic directness of painterly action.

Gershuni worked horizontally. He covered the floor with paper and crawled over it with his hands soaked in paint, reminiscent of a blood-dripping wound. His painterly universe is earthly, instinctively sensual and regressive, yet characterized by faith and graceful transformations. His work generates a blind, exuberant physicality and confronts it with figurative iconography and verbal expressions. Many paintings contain historically charged symbols and handwritten Hebrew passages from Jewish prayers, transforming the uneven, overflowing surfaces of liquid paint, his seemingly involuntary, pre-linguistic compositions into a vivid theatrical performance, a ritual of ecstasy.

No Father No Mother was the first comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to an Israeli at the Neue Nationalgalerie. It was also Gershuni's first major exhibition in a European museum in more than 30 years. The exhibition title – No Father No Mother – contains a double denial. It comes from a painting (No Father No Mother, 1998) and represents a confession, a negative reflection on rootlessness and discontinuity. Comprehensive yet open-plan, the exhibition bypassed evolutionary, retrospective arrangements, period divisions, and chronological orders, presenting Gershuni's work as a vital, non-hierarchical entity, an ongoing activity.