Shai Kremer

Julie M. Gallery, Tel Aviv
Acquired from the above

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, 2008-2009 (another example exhibited)
Paris, Galerie Filles du Calvaire; New York, Julie Saul Gallery; San Francisco, Robert Koch Gallery; Tel Aviv, Julie M. Gallery; Houston Center for Photography; Portland, Blue Sky Gallery, Infected Landscape, 2008-2011, p. 92-93, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue (another example exhibited)
London, Tate Modern; San Francisco, SF MoMA; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, 2011, p. 116, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue (another example exhibited)

Nathalie Herschdorfer, Afterwards: Contemporary Photography Confronting the Past, 2011, p. 142-143, illustrated in color

Digital c-print, mounted. In excelled condition. Not viewed out of the frame. In raking light there is a minute protrusion in the blue sky in the left portion of the photograph.
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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.

Shai Kremer’s photography is a distinct example of the intersection between the Israeli existence and the international postmoderna. Indeed, what could epitomize Israel more than a Palestinian ghost-town, built on the Tze’elim military training camp in the southern desert, photographed by Kremer on 2007? At the same time, what could more contemporary and western than the photographic strategy of simulation and impersonation? Kremer, born in 1974, is an Israeli artist based in New York; he studied photography at Camera Obscura in Tel Aviv before completing his studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2008, he published his photography catalogue Infected Landscape, presenting photographs of military training fields and battle sites, earlier exhibited under the same title at July M. Gallery in Tel Aviv. The panoramic photograph of Tze’elim training camp from this series, which was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2009 (in the group exhibition Reality Check), renders the violence and pain of the occupation in a blood-freezing setting, free of any human being, in which “rehearsals” of very non-theatrical military actions are taking place. The Oriental ideal of the early period of Israeli art has cleared its place in favor of the Arab landscape illustrated as a battle field of death-echoing emptiness.

A smaller size of this image is in the prestigious collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.