CloudMapping @ Fabienne Levy Gallery, opening February 16, 2023

CloudMapping / Justin Kamp

Time and place are not abstractions, in Yuval Yairi’s work, but rather intrinsically linked formal modes. Throughout the Israeli artist’s practice, he has persistently investigated how these two subjects operate as functions of one another: how a place lives in one’s mind not as a singular “decisive moment,” as Henri Cartier-Bresson might say, but as a conglomeration of successive views, gathered and arrayed over the course of a life. In “CloudMapping,” opening at Fabienne Levy Gallery on February 16th, Yairi continues these persistent investigations, broadening them into new material realms.

“CloudMapping” is the final part in a trilogy of shows that Yairi has developed over the past decade, all of which have captured, through means both plastic and photographic, the granular details of his Israeli homeland, its substrate of shattered bullets and cypress seeds. In “CloudMapping,” though, Yairi moves away from the camera’s direct representation. Here, instead, a realm of ink: architectonic drawings of seed pods and men, of boats suspended in schematic grids. Clouds, adrift, over a rubbed-pigment desert. 

The subjects of “CloudMapping” are not the specific places Yairi conjured in previous works. They are instead concepts, rendered from the vantage of non-concrete time.  In these drawings, Yairi gives form to the transience of representation, and indeed of the material world: Trees growing, harvested for lumber; towers, crumbling or not yet built; clouds, hanging then gone. Here, again, a remembrance of Cartier-Bresson. “For the world is movement, and you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.”

Group exhibition: Quest_Ceramics & photography

Between-Gaza-&-Rafah.jpgYuval Yairi, Between Gaza & Rafah, 2015, 57 x 40 cm
Quest_Ceramics & photography, Group exhibition, Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center,
Opening November 19th, 2015
Curators: Talia Tokatly, Roni Ben-Ari
17 Ha’amal Street, Tel Aviv 66532, Israel

תערוכה קבוצתית  /  חיפוש קרוב – חומר וצילום
אוצרות: טליה טוקטלי, רוני בן-ארי
פתיחה: 19נובמבר 2015 בשעה 20:00
בית בנימיני – המרכז לקרמיקה עכשווית
http://www.benyaminiceramics.org/

“Collecting Dust- Contemporary Israeli Art”, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem יומן אבק

"Collecting Dust- Contemporary Israeli Art" at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

“Collecting Dust- Contemporary Israeli Art” at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, December 4, 2013

http://www.imj.org.il/exhibitions/presentation/exhibit.asp?id=878

Curator: Tami Manor-Friedman

From Collecting Dust exhibition catalogue, text by Tamar Manor-Friedman, curator,

The Israel Museum, 2013

“Nimrod Roundabout” was taken just hours prior to the museum’s reopening, and it focuses on the final cleaning-up operations in the main lobby, where Itzhak Danziger’s sculpture “Nimrod” stands as a centerpiece. When the images are screened in rapid succession, the anonymous worker maneuvering the floor scrubber is blurred, his repetitive circular movement around the gleaming icon that has become a symbol of Israeli art assumes the aspect of a ritual dance around a sacred figure – reminicent, perhaps, of the hands of a clock moving between the ephemeral and the eternal, between the human and the sublime. Yairi’s photographic odyssey concludes at this very moment, when the ancient patriarch “Nimrod”, carved from desert sandstone, stands on its pedestral in the spotless temple.

יומן אבק – אמנות ישראלית עכשווית

אוצרת: תמי מנור-פרידמן

מוזיאון ישראל, ירושלים