Ori Gersht

Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv
Acquired from the above

New York, The Armory Show, 2004 (another example exhibited)

This photograph is in excellent condition. It is not glazed. The two lower corners are very slightly lifted from the mount.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

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.

Do not Ori Gersht’s photographs prove to be a combination of charming beauty and the awareness of pain and finality? Gersht, born in Tel Aviv in 1967, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London where he is based, has exhibited numerous works in European museums (London’s Tate, to name one), in the United States (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) and in Israel (Tel Aviv Museum of Art), and has won the Tel Aviv Museum Constantiner photography prize in 2000.  The Lister route in the Pyrenees Mountains, photographed in a majestic fog in his work from 2008 Lost There, describes Walter Benjamin’s final view during his 1940 failed attempt to cross the Pyrenees and flee from occupied France. Gersht’s body of work deals extensively with traumas and memories of disasters, when ideal, sublime landscapes conceal narratives of survival or victimhood within. Thus, Gersht’s ancient and entangled olive tree, photographed in an Arab village in northern Israel (displayed in the 2004 exhibition ‘Blaze’ in Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv), appears burnt and blurry, as if it were scorched by an annihilating light. In his journeys, Gersht photographs remains from disaster-struck areas (in Ukraine, on the way to Auschwitz, in Bosnia and more), bringing together poetic beauty and violence.