Ilit Azuolay

Acquired directly from the artist

Tel Aviv, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Gallery, The Keys, 2010 (another example exhibited)
New York, Andrea Meislin Gallery, The Keys, 2011 (another example exhibited)
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Magic Lantern: Recent Acquisitions in Contemporary Art, 2011-2012 (another example exhibited)
Paris, Ville Emerige, Pluriel: Regards sur l'Art Contemporain Israelian, 2012 (another example exhibited)
Toronto, Museum of Canadian Contemporary Art, Contact Photography Festival, Public Installation, Tree For Too One, 2013 (another example exhibited)
Tel Aviv, Shpilman Institute For Photography ,The Double Exposure Project, 2014, no. 1, detail illustrated on p. 34 in black and white, illustrated in color on the inside cover of the exhibition catalogue

Suzanne Landau, Art in America, November 2013, In the Studio: Ilit Azoulay

This photograph is in excellent condition. Not viewed out of frame.
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PROPERTY SOLD TO BENEFIT THE SHPILMAN INSTITUTE FOR PHOTOGRAPHY (Lots 38 - 48)

The SIP’s public research collection of photographs reflects the Institute’s profound interest in studying different realms of the photographic medium. The collection, numbering over 900 works, focuses on historical images, contemporary Israeli and international photography. Conceptually, the collection focuses on photography’s disengagement from traditional documentary approaches and towards the discovery of other modes of action in the artistic field. The Israeli collection features central works of Israel’s most prominent contemporary photographers, dating from the 1970s to recent years.

AN INTRODUCTION TO ISRAELI PHOTOGRAPHY by Gideon Ofrat

Perhaps, the most significant momentum in contemporary Israeli art pertains to the field of photography. Outstanding Photography departments in art academies and in leading museums, galleries dedicated to photography, photography prizes, ‘The Shpilman Photography Institute’ and many more have instigated in Israel what has long been apparent in the international art world: the golden age of photography. And thus, alongside valuable and bold documentary photography, mainly committed to the representation of grief and sorrow in the ‘Israeli condition’ given the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Micha Bar-Am, Pavel Wolberg, Miki Kratsman, Alex Levac, Gaston Itskovich and more), there was also the artistic photography which has begun to flourish, winning recognition and appreciation among the world’s most renowned museums and galleries. Simultaneous with the unprecedented pluralism taking on the post-modern artistic scene in Israel and worldwide, the practice of artistic photography has also reaffirmed a multitude of syntaxes of various artists. Indeed, even if one does not expect to encounter an “Israeli photographic substance“, most of the photographs on view here – the works of ten of Israel’s most important contemporary photographers –ratify a visual tension between trauma and fiction, with sediments of unease concealed in the depth of the artistic effort to convert the realistic into the simulated.

Ilit Azoulay, born in Israel in 1972, an MFA graduate from the Bezalel Academy, designs fictitious interiors using digitally manipulated images and based on evidence of ruin. Tree for Too One, her work from 2010, showcases a staged wall installation that appears to be almost scientifically catalogued, a montage comprised of remnants collected by the photographer around demolition-bound buildings and tumble-down houses – rocks, objects, plastic shards, pieces of metal, etc. Azoulay, whose large-scale photograph Room 8, was purchased in 2011 by the Pompidou Centre in Paris, has garnered immense critical and commercial success with single and group shows in Israel (Tel Aviv Museum, for example) and in New York (Andrea Meislin Gallery), and also won the prestigious Tel Aviv Museum Constantiner photography prize in 2011. After Azoulai has carefully collected her found objects, sorted them and occasionally painted them, she takes photographs of each object under the same light and at the same angle, and then inserts them into a digital montage with no apparent hierarchy. A perfect order mysteriously prevails in this work, charging the familiar with a sense of the bizarre while aiming to respond to chaos and destruction with dominant absolute aesthetics.