Sharon Yaari

Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv
Acquired from the above

Tel Aviv, Sommer Gallery, Jerusalem Boulevard, 2009
Vienna, Galerie Martin Janda, Sharon Ya'ari, 2009 (another example exhibited)
Basel, Kunsthaus Baselland, Jerusalem Blvd. II, 2011
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Ticho House, Photographs: Gilad Ophir, Sharon Ya’ari In conjunction with "Traces IV", 2010-2011

Archival pigment print - a diptych. Both photographs in overall good condition. Not viewed out of frame. The lefthand photograph (2006) has very light lifting at edges.
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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.

Sharon Yaari’s photographs illustrate a space charged with memory and destruction. Yaari, born in Israel on 1966 and a graduate of Bezalel, has exhibited in solo shows at the Tel-Aviv museum, the Herzliya Museum, Sommer Gallery in Tel Aviv and Lisson Gallery in London, and in 2005 won the Gottesdiener prize from the Tel Aviv Museum. The prize committee identified “various stages of extinction, loss and deconstruction” in Yaari’s landscape photographs, in which seemingly-banal imagery actually contains a “tragic and narrative quality”.  Yaari’s photographs were defined as “post-traumatic” –  marginal and charmless landscapes suggesting evidence of past activity in urban settings. This diptych from 2006-2009 displays, in the first photograph – a meager picnic table standing beneath a diminished tree, and in the second – the remains of the shattered table buried under foliage and fallen branches. Yaari finds death in heart of the Israeli daily life. Yaari comments: “There is some kind of illusion and utopia here, the ethos of this place that tried to become instant-Europe, with the flora and the appearance of sites trying to be Western. […] it is touching: this despaired attempt to beautify, it is pitiable.”