Zohar Gotesman (Israel)
6. 8. 2019 – 11. 9. 2019
Zohar Gotesman (b. 1979, in Israel) is a sculptor based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Gotesman is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Between 2011-12 he spent a year in Carrara, Italy, where he studied traditional marble carving.
He also graduated from the Archaeology Department of Ben-Gurion University.
Zohar has won the prestigious Outset Israel Art Support Fund. He is the recipient of the Nata Dushnitsky-Kaplan Foundation Prize, the Young Artist Award of the Israeli Ministry of Culture and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation award. He has received support from the Pais Institute.
Zohar had solo exhibitions at Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2013 and at the Tel Aviv Museum in September 2017. Gotesman exhibits excessively at major group shows in well-known museums and galleries in Israel and abroad, among them at the Petach Tikvah Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum, at the Kade Amersfoort, the Netherlands, the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Colombia University, New York, the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the Artists House, Tel Aviv, Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, and many more.
He has permanent public sculptures in Jerusalem, Haifa and Modiin, and his sculptures are in private collections in Israel and around the world.
In his sculptures he attempt to address an ongoing conflict; between the historic and the contemporary, the aesthetic and the repulsive, the mundane and the sublime. His works often create a juxtaposition between a naïve or romantic view of the past and an acknowledgment that this stance necessarily relies on a fetishistic artifice. This tension drives me to counter my own attraction to the beautiful, formal and pure, with the grotesque and the deformed.
By using humor in my work, he try to lower the viewers’ defences, leaving them exposed to troubling layers of meaning, to which they would otherwise perhaps remain resistant. By using beauty and formal aspects he wish to create a sense of physical elation, followed by the exposure of the perverse elements of the work. These elements include abstract images of ejaculation, mounds of flesh and threatening fluidity.
