Noam Wenkert

 

Curators: Vered Hadad, Hili Greenfeld

 

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January 2017

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The first unit exhibition as part of the "Artist Project" which is intended to allow the artist to create a greenhouse and a toolbox. The staff of the Gallery in Koresh 14 will provide the chosen artist with curatorial guidance, construction and editing of text, guidance and a financial grant. At the end of the process, a solo exhibition will be presented and a catalog for the exhibition will be launched.

About four years ago, Wenkert became interested in people's relationships with the paintings hanging in their homes. She says she found the thought of a painting hanging in the house and accompanying the lives of people more exciting than a painting in a museum.

At home, paintings are viewed at different times of life, against the background of different mental states − this is a kind of long-term relationship of a person and painting with him is alive. As part of the work process, people asked and scratched about works of art that were in their home during their adolescence, ones that had a significant relationship with them.

The exhibition was created around the stories Wenkert collected from the various people − the inhabitants of Kora14, friends, colleagues and also complete strangers. From the stories a mixed world of childhood memories, first aesthetic impressions and dialogue with art was built − not in the art halls but in the rooms of the house.

In the opening painting of the series, figures quoted from Picasso's "Guernica" are placed in a bedroom, in the midst of intercourse.

The painting is based on the memory of an American student, who said he was afraid to enter his parents' bedroom where a reproduction of the Guernica was hanging. The painting combines the fear of violent work with the fear of “catching” parents in sexual activity. The encounter with the painting echoes the initial scene, in Freud's language − an encounter with an expressive visual play, which cannot be explained and placed in existing knowledge, and within it lie the problems that will again disturb our rest during life.

Thus with other works Wenkert creates hybrid paintings of the story and the work about which it is told. Wenkert treats the salon kitsch of works of art as reproductions alongside which we grew up, in her action she gives them a mythical status as memory designers, as imagination keys, as unconscious milestones in our lives, and as objects charged with meaning by being there in our private rooms.

About the artist

Noam Wenkert, a graduate artist from Bezalel, a graduate of the Art College and holds a bachelor's degree from Tel Aviv University, lives in south Tel Aviv and teaches art at the Manshar School of Art in Tel Aviv, Kay College in Be'er Sheva and Reut High School in Haifa. Alongside her studio work, Wenkert examines in a series of "pictorial actions" the connection between painter, painting and audience.