Participating artists:
Vered Aharonovitch, Deganit Berest, Léo Caillard, Lili Cohen Prah-ya, Sigalit Etel Landau, Sharon Pazner, Hava Raucher, Noa Raz Melamed, Irit Tamari.

The sculpture exhibition “Athens in Tel Aviv” was featured in conjunction with the holiday of Hanukkah, which is celebrated to commemorate the elimination of all Greek symbols from the Temple in Jerusalem, and the resumption of the ritual activities performed there by the Jews. The discourse related to this holiday usually revolves around the contrast between observant Jews and those who sought to popularize Hellenism, which is seen as an irresolvable dichotomy. One of the central differences between ancient Greek and Jewish cultures was the multitude of deities and their sculptural representation in Greek culture, versus Jewish monotheism and the prohibition on creating sculptural representations of divinity. It is interesting to note that the word “sculpture” appears 43 times in the Bible, mainly in statements of opposition to the placement of sculptures on altars and in sacrificial sites – an opposition born, perhaps, due to the presence of sculptures in the Jewish sphere. Yet the Bible also refers in detail to the image of God, as in the following verse from the Book of Genesis: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Rashi argued that God indeed had a likeness, while Maimonides brought about a tremendous shift in the conception of God’s image when he wrote: “God is not a body and does not possess a shape.”

This exhibition, which is concerned with the image of the body in contemporary Israeli culture as it relates to the holiday of Hanukkah, seeks to explore the positive aspects of ancient Greek culture. It suggests that at present, Jewish culture is by and large a “Hellenistic Judaism,” one that embraces the values of humanism, scientific research, philosophy and art, while preserving Jewish identity.

The exhibition title “Athens in Tel Aviv” invites the “Classical” to exist alongside the “here and now.” In Athens in the fifth century B.C.E., figurative sculpture was at its apogee, and sculptors sought to endow the human figures they created with a naturalistic appearance by studying human anatomy and painting the figures to approximate the coloring of the human body. The subjects explored in contemporary Israeli sculpture, as given expression in this exhibition, constitute an attempt to look back to Classical sculpture in order to learn from it about the present and the future, about family relaitonships and biblical stories. In addition to figurative sculptures, the exhibition also includes abstract sculptures, as well as ones resembling the ritual figurines that preceded the rise of Classical sculpture in Greece.

Curator: Shira Friedman