Half A Winning Horse
December 1, 2021
Illustration Week or as the local scene likes to call it, the Illustration Festival has been in its eighth year.
The event, which is a collaboration between the Tel Aviv Municipality and Portfolio Magazine, and lasted 10 days (November 2021), was attended by 700 illustrators in 76 exhibitions, who exhibited their work in exhibitions displayed in cultural and art spaces, collaborative galleries, museums and entertainment venues throughout the city.
The Illustration Week which has become an urban tradition, is dedicated to original Israeli illustration, and is intended to encourage artistic creation in the field and give a stage to hundreds of local illustrators, old and young alike, as well as to present exhibitions and illustrations initiated by academic institutions and independent illustrators’ organizations.
This favorite institute illustrates the importance that the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality sees in cultivating culture in all its forms and investing in it. The municipality invests about 6.5% of its budget in culture and the arts each year; Consistently works to make culture accessible to large and diverse populations, invests in the future generation of cultural consumers and generators and preserves the status of Tel Aviv-Yafo as a leading, pluralistic and innovative Israeli and international cultural center.
Nurit Gross, Lion and Crocodile, 2021, from the exhibition Half A Winning Horse – Baron Munchausen in Old Jaffa. Courtesy of Zur Kotzer
We chose two of our favorite exhibitions to tell you about:
Home Is Just
The meaning of the concept of a house. This group exhibition was curated by Reut Barnea and presented in a lovely space in Jaffa’s Old City.
Square, usually white. Above it is a triangle, usually red. An image that often does not reflect the real home and yet – it is there, a schematic image that is detailed on so many strings, and reflects values and worldview. Artists present alongside a series of house paintings of children under the age of 10 living in different places in the country, in an exhibition that deals with the meaning of the concept of a house and its connection to the childish and primary image of a small house with a red roof.
Iddo Markus, Homes of others from the exhibition “Home is just”
Iddo Markus refers to the houses of others in his oil paintings, some from his imagination and some from an old collection he has in his possession. His paintings, miniatures on the thin border between figurative and abstract, move between homes that are planted in nature and homes that are more about a state of mind than a realistic place.
Half A Winning Horse –
Baron Munchausen in
Old Jaffa
A grotesque interpretation of the plots of Baron Munchausen.
The exhibition, which took place at the Lotan Gallery in Old Jaffa, presents a fruitful collaboration between two illustrators: Sergei Iskov and Nurit Gross, graduates of the Department of Visual Communication at Bezalel the Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and here is what the curator Hila Noam wrote about the exhibition:
“Half-bodied horses, lunar flights, life-threatening hunting trips, and snow-drawn wolves are all just a few of the starring elements in Baron Munchausen’s boundary travel stories, as described in Rudolf Erich Resfa’s book of 1785. Iscove and Gross, produces a grotesque visual interpretation of these plots while examining the boundaries between truth and falsehood, fiction and madness. By referring to the ancient space in Jaffa and examining it in two dimensions and in three dimensions, they raise questions about the hero’s place, cruelty and a particularly exaggerated imagination”.
Sergey Isakov, Half Horse, Dyptich, 2021, Acrylic on wood 70 x 100 (cm each wood board) Courtesy of Zur Kotzer
