"Pillar of Cloud"

A New Group Exhibition at the Hermann Struck Museum, Haifa

"Pillar of Cloud"

Curator: Svetlana Reingold

Arie Azene, Avner Ben Gal, Ofer Bessudo, Inga Fonar Cocos, Eli Diner, Yigal Feliks, Ori Gersht, Uri Gershuni, Maya Gold, Shlomi Haggai, Ilana Hamawi, Jonathan Hirschfeld, Gaston Zvi Ickowicz, Mosh Kashi, Roi Kuper, Leora Laor, Yael Oren, Na'ama Porat, Dafna Sartiel, Hanan Shlonsky, Ronen Siman Tov, Berndnaut Smilde, Maya Smira, Hermann Struck, Shirley Wegner, Gal Weinstein, Sharon Ya'ari, Guy Yechiely, Ammar Younis, Hanna Ben-Haim Yulzari

In the modern and post-modern age, the experience of the sublime has gradually eroded, with the adaptation and commodification of nature and its integration in the global consumer society. Postmodern painting returns to "sublime" themes, but often lends them a horrific character. Artists' fascination with nature now seems more like an alienated longing for something lost. The contemporization of the sublime is explored in this exhibition through the various approaches of contemporary artists to the theme of clouds. Their works show us how the Pillar of Cloud is transformed into the smoke of war and shelling, and how nature becomes an absent quality.

The exhibition conveys a sense of tension between different worlds: between an aspiration towards a sublime, spiritual realm, and the depiction of a catastrophic, dark reality. This tension is represented through the theme of clouds. The same clouds that once represented a celestial world symbolize, in contemporary art works, distance from nature and from any form of sublime existence. The expression "pillar of cloud," which in the Bible denotes the appearance of God before the people of Israel, has become in the contemporary mind a representation of a difficult, bloody reality, in the wake of the IDF's Pillar of Defense (literally "Pillar of Cloud") Operation in the Gaza Strip in 2012.

The artist Hermann Struck often depicted clouds in his prints and mostly in his oil paintings, particularly in the 1930s, looking out from his home in Haifa towards Haifa Bay and the Galilee. These works convey a passion for a celestial existence and the experience of an open, airy space. They express the artist's understanding of the conception of the sublime, in the spirit of European Romanticism, with regard to the local landscape. The light-filled skies of Palestine represent in his works the conception of the sky in Jewish sources, particularly in the Book of Psalms.