Yehudit Sasportas

Sommer Gallery, Tel Aviv

Brunswick, Germany, Kunstverein Braunschweig, The Laboratory, 2008, pp. 12, 40, 46-47, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue

This work is in good overall condition. There are a few small scattered stains in the lower left corner and several hairline scratches along the lower left corner of the right panel, one in the center of the right panel and one to the right edge of the right panel. There is surface dirt from handling along the edges of the MDF.
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Born in Israel in 1969, Yehudit Sasportas received both her BFA and MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Deisign and attended the Academy of Arts and Science, Academy of Art, Cooper Union in New York in 1993. She has been awarded numerous awards and fellowships since 1997 and exhibits regularly in solo and group exhibitions worldwide. In 2007, Sasportas represented Israel at the 52^ndVenice Biennale and has just recently held an important one-person show at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (May-October 2013).

The Last Name, offered here, was shown in Sasportas’ 2008 exhibition titled The Laboratory. In the exhibition catalogue Hilke Wagner refers to this work while discussing Sasportas and the exhibition: “The works of Yehudit Sasportas are complex and multi-layered, from several perspectives. At first glance, the large-format landscapes captivate with their cool beauty. Yet, at second glance, they create uncertainty. What one supposed to be an idyll in black and white reveals itself as a near-apocalyptic landscape. There are eerie, bizarre natural backdrops – cool forests, bright mountain ranges, gloomy, uncanny swamps. Sometimes they are dead landscapes, complete with trees that are dead or burned, linked with surreal, dreamlike elements. They are not natural landscapes – that soon becomes clear. Rather, they are alien, artificial, fabricated. They are ruins of a symbolic idyll and an expression of a deep alienation… Technoid-seeming elements and structures, like engraved concentric circles, and vertical grey lines like dripping rain – reminiscent of barcodes – drive out all romantic feeling... The works make us uneasy; they cannot be grasped; everything about them appears to be hybrid and full of contradictions. The black and white bog- and forest-scapes are dark and light, delicate and heavy, idyllic-utopian and eerily threatening, all at the same time. They are alive and dead. All orientation fails. Duplications, reflections, and simultaneous perspectives – such as distant and close-up views – exist side by side within one painting, robbing us of certainty, and creating an oscillating focus. Where do we stand? Inside or outside? What are we getting here – insights or outlooks? And in between, we keep finding puzzling, round or oval empty spaces in the painting – holes. But do they lead to another dimension? Do they reveal or conceal? lluminations or annihilations? The challenge is not to lose oneself in these depths. Or do we dare to take the plunge (see The Last Name, pp. 12, 46 / 47)?” (Hilke Wagner, Yehudit Sasportas The Laboratory, Kunstverein Braunschweig, München (exhibition catalogue), 2008, pp. 25-26).

Mira Lapidot reviews Yehudit Sasportas’ works from the last twenty years in the 2013 Israel Museum catalogue and summarizes: “Yehudit Sasportas often says that things are not as they appear. Instead of instilling doubt or despair, this realization that we cannot fully understand reality became a point of departure for a spiritual quest. Sasportas regards it as impelling, and addresses it again and again in her work. She fills her art and the gallery space with things – with detailed, intricate, exquisitely beautiful images that come from and portray the visible world. And yet, what she seeks to depict is the invisible: emotional states and hidden forces. These unseen energies are not just the subject of her artworks, they are also the very essence of her artistic practice. Thus it seems natural that imaging techniques such as radiology and computed tomography, which expose layers the eye cannot see, have informed her works. Her coordinates are concrete and symbolic: enigmatic forests and shadowy swamps: the museum space representing an unfathomable repository of matter and knowledge. Ultimately, she says, we do not fully know anything; our perception of reality can only be incomplete, and we are forever destined to search for understanding.” (Mira Lapidot, “What the Eye Cannot See”, Yehudit Sasportas Seven Winters, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (exhibition catalogue), 2013, pp.54-55).