The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present Ori Gersht: Lost in Time an exhibition open May 20 – September 4, 2011.
Ori Gersht, Chasing Good Fortune, Imperial Memories, Night Fly #1, 2010. Archival Inkjet Print. Collection of Sandra and Jerry Le Winter.
Ori Gersht depicts scenes of natural beauty that perceptively disguise and reveal a history of violence. Featuring selections from a trilogy of works based on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century European still-life painting, and two new series based on Japanese history and scenery, this exhibition represents five years of recent work by the artist. This is the first solo museum exhibition of work by the artist in the Western United States.
Gersht’s work fuses the past with what he has called the “ultimate present” by creating sublime scenes that become precipitously unsettling through both sudden and gradual obliteration. Each work renders a prolonged moment of suspense through the use of stop-motion photography and slowmotion film. Although achieved through the medium of photography and film, the visceral level on which these works operate most closely mimics that of their inspiration: painting. Referencing historic paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán, Fantin Latour, and Chardin, among others, these photographs and films provide a meditation on life, loss, destiny, and chance.
Allusions to the catastrophic violence of the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil War are found in these works and in later such events, including the bombing of Hiroshima and the suicide bombs that Gersht feared during his frequent visits to Israel, and that continue to threaten there and elsewhere in the Middle East.
This exhibition is made possible by the generosity of The Luria Foundation.
The mission of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is to integrate art into the lives of people. The collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art comprises 27,000 works of art spanning more than 5,000 years of human creativity, including a collection of classical antiquities rivaled in the West only by the J. Paul Getty Museum. The museum has a a large collection of French Impressionist masterpieces, including the largest collection of Claude Monet paintings on the West Coast and the only intact mural in the United States by David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Portrait of Mexico Today”, 1932. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened to the public on June 5, 1941, in a building that was at one time the Santa Barbara Post Office (1914–1932).
www.sbma.net