Gili avissar | Pink

Gili avissar | Pink | Solo Exhibition

Circle1, Berlin

Photos by Mia Gourvitch

Opening:25.10.2014

Closing: 29.11.2014

From the exhibition text:

In Avissar’s video the color PINK becomes a place; by its materialization in a specific, actual site it unfolds an ongoing process of camouflage and erasure, dismantling and rebuilding itself. Avissar, whose work is often synonymous with a rough yet poetic sculptural touch, is no less an action artist: “More than I intend to build something new, I seek to erase the memory of what was there before, so as not to enclose myself in a depository of past works,” he says. This continual shifting and renewing of past artifacts should be understood in terms of freedom of movement – but not as an abstract ideal, rather as an adherence to a continuum that unfolds from one work to the next, constituting each step as a localized station in an evolving sculptural and performative body of work.

An inseparable part of these transformative processes are the video and photographic documentation which Avissar undertakes in the studio. After having transferred the Urban Remains exhibition back to his studio he began to ‘erase’ its parts by soaking them in heavy layers of paint – a process which he accompanied by a fervent self-documentation. From deconstructed parts the installation again assumed a unified form, with the result comprising into an alternative studio within the regular one; and inside this space, which gradually became a pulsating core with a life of its own, emerged a series of creatures that the artist himself embodied. After the first figure in the series, came a succession of other figures, each characterized by a different color. As the series progressed these characters became increasingly elastic in shape and color.

The Oval Drawings are an endless cycle of images, as one image is “deleted” by its successor. While in his video Avissar erases his previous works with the coloring process, here he cancels the singular image in his own drawings by overloading them with endless shapes and images.