Exhibitions

The collection was started by Tzvi Neta’s father, Mr. Yosef (Joe) Boxenbaum, one of Israel’s first industrialists and a passionate Zionist, who purchased the works about two decades after Struck’s death, apparently from the artist’s widow. Much can be learned about Struck’s creative processes from this collection. Many of the prints were copies but not duplicates. Comparing them reveals much about the depth of thought involved in Struck’s work process. For this reason, I asked to curate an exhibit based on Mr. Neta’s donation.

Local art, whether Israeli or Palestinian, has over the generations sharpened its gaze upon the homeland's scenery – a gaze traditionally burdened by concern and distress, on both the personal-existential and the historical-geopolitical level. However, the local artistic discourse surrounding this issue has scarcely considered its gender-oriented aspects. Neither the Israeli nor the Palestinian artistic discourse distinguishes between the masculine and the feminine gaze with regard to this charged subject. The present exhibition cluster seeks to address this complex and mostly neglected issue.

Hermann Struck, born and raised in Berlin, was firmly rooted in the capital’s soil. He had studied at the Berlin Academy of Art and was a member of the city's artists' association. Though he left Germany in 1922 in favor of Haifa, he held on to his studio in Berlin's Hansa quarter. Struck visited Germany regularly until 1933, especially during the summer months. In those years the German capital became a modern metropolis teeming with motion and innovation. At the same time, the status of rural ideals rose, despite the decline of the countryside's economic status. As a witness to this trend, during his Berlin days Struck often depicted views of the German rural landscape. These works are at the center of the present show.

The last two decades have placed Palestinian women artists at the forefront of the Israeli art scene. These artists can be viewed in the framework of the feminist project, which seeks to subvert gender distinctions as social axioms. On the one, hand, the national framework is the artistic sphere from which these artists draw their self-representation.

The exhibition presents newly acquired works from the collection of the Haifa Museum of Art. The collection's expansion, preservation, and display are a vital and important part of the museum's activity. Above all, a museum's collection is that which distinguishes it from others. In 2018 the Haifa Museum of Art acquired contemporary Israeli artworks, all of them dating from 2000 or later, created in a range of media: painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and photography. Some are now being exhibited for the first time.

Different cultures have imagined the clouds as the dwelling place of the gods. This most visible natural phenomenon has been linked with myths regarding that which is hidden from sight or uncontrollable. Clouds can be seen everywhere, here and now, allowing urban man to connect with nature. Constantly changing, they evade definition and confound our sense of time. In art, clouds suggest sublime realms that remain unattainable for the viewer. As an artistic theme, the cloud also has Biblical connotations, in its association with the "pillar of cloud" as a revelation of the divine to the Israelites.

Germany of the 1920s witnessed the birth of a new artistic movement, called "Neue Sachlichkeit" or "New Objectivity." The present exhibition addresses this movement's significant impact on the Jewish-German artists who immigrated to Palestine in those years, and its partial affinity with the work of Hermann Struck.

Shahar Marcus is a performance artist focusing on video and performance works. In this exhibition he presents video works made in recent years, alongside prints based on frames taken from those works.

In 1933, after Hitler's rise to power, large numbers of German-Jewish artists and intellectuals began leaving Germany for Palestine. Most were followers of German expressionism, well-rooted in the German cultural heritage.