Deganit Berest

Julie M. Gallery, Tel Aviv
Acquired from the above

Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Dreams, 2001, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue (another example exhibited)
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Contemporary Israeli Photography, Three Generations, 2003, p. 19, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue (another example exhibited)
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Deganit Berest: The Conspiracy of Nature, Works 1973-2013, 2013, p. 182, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue

This work is in overall excellent condition with vibrant colors. It has not been viewed out of the 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.

Another artist fascinated by the tension between chaos and order is Deganit Berest, one of Israel’s most important artists since the 1970s. Berest was born in Israel in 1949, studied art in Israel and in New York, exhibited in the Israel’s finest museums and has won many prizes. In 2001 Berest’s work was exhibited at the Herzliya Museum in her solo exhibition titled Dreams, a series of square color photographs made from layered images, like consolidated suppressed dream imagery. The artist created an image comprised of various colored layers, using negatives of personal footage from past works, and screening simultaneously several frames from the same roll simultaneously on colored photographic paper. Berest, known for examining the borders of rationalism and delusion in her works, in the Dreams series extended this inspection to the relationship between conscious and sub-conscious, while remaining in the unsolved tension between past (memory) and present, rationality and irrationality.

Another example from this edition is in the Collection of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.