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SPRINGS
SPRINGS
PETACH TIKVA MUSEUM OF ART
ISRAEL
2017
The artist Oren Pinhassi was invited to "Outset Bialik Residency" from July to September 2017, for the creation and installation of his new solo exhibition "Springs", at the Petach Tikva art museum, curated by Marie Shek.
Oren Pinhassi, a sculptor who creates large-scale installations, is dedicated to the demarcation of architectural objects. The exhibition route makes the viewer walk with curiosity, taking him from one side to the other, from the inside out. The sensual installation draws the viewer to wander in and around it, and to look through it at the other, the stranger, the stranger within us, as Julia Kristeva said in her book Strangers to Ourselves.
Familiar and mundane objects and substances, such as towels, mirrors, deck chairs, a cactus, a sponge and Vaseline, are restricted in space, as their installation amidst columns of raw and phallic concrete makes the viewer wonder where they are find.
Apparently abandoned by absent people, the objects prevent one from determining their identities or concluding who they were and what will become of them. Pinhassi subjects his materials to an alchemical process, during which the soft becomes hard, the liquid becomes solid, the full becomes empty, and the pleasant - unsettling. Examining them on a human scale implies subordinating architectural elements to questions of identity, both private and collective.
Pinhassi builds a setting reminiscent of a public bathroom, placing the individual in a public space in a situation that is private. He delves into the interrelationships between the place and the objects that occupy it, the human body and elements such as soap and water, chemicals and minerals. In public baths, however, the politics of space applies not only to the individual's relationships with his body and objects, but also to his relationship with others; to interpersonal relationships in the geopolitical and geoeconomic field, in the global world in which we live, interact and operate.
Oren Pinhassi (b.1985, Tel Aviv, Israel; lives and works in New York) graduated from the Yale School of Art in 2014. Recent solo shows include Castello San Basilio, Basilicata, 2019; Palazzo Monti, Brescia, 2019; One in the mouth and one in the heart at Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles, 2018; Springs at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel, 2017; Nature Calls at RIBOT Gallery, Milan, 2017; Hanging Gardens at New Capital Projects, Chicago, 2016. Group exhibitions include For Mario at Tina Kim Gallery, New York, 2019; Four at Yossi Milo, New York, 2019; This Is Not A Prop at David Zwirner, New York, 2018. Completed residencies include Outset Contemporary Art Fund’s Bialik Residency, 2017, the Shandanken Project at Storm King Sculpture Park, New York, 2016 and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, 2014. Pinhassi has been awarded numerous prizes including The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2018; Fannie B. Pardee Prize, Yale School of Art, 2014; The Art Slant Prize, 2014; Shlomo Witkin Prize, 2011 and the Excellence Program Scholarship, Israeli Ministry of Education, 2011. Pinhassi lives and works in New York City.
Pinhassi’s installations examine the relationship between the human figure and the built environment by conjuring evocative sites that intersect public and private exchange. Past works explored bathhouses as spaces of vulnerability and sensuality, or cruising spots in nature as voyeuristic portals to erotic transformation. The sculptures in The Crowd invoke architectures of authority, incorporating features of manmade spaces designed to exert power over individuals within them. Quotations from civic institutions are equally abundant – voting booths, segregation cells, institutional desks. Points of bureaucratic exchange become expressions of bodily desire, as teller windows imply receptive orifices.
Pinhassi’s primary materials are plaster and sand, methodically layered over welded steel skeletons. The visual sensibility created by both medium and application is one of constructive ambiguity – the tactile surface announces itself as handmade, yet the predominantly grey colour and repetition of form across the group of sculptures evokes a spectre of concrete modernism that is instantaneously disavowed by their voluptuous sensuality, urging us towards a logic of futuristic hybridity. Standing in contrast to the more architectural works are several comparatively humanoid figures, if only for their suggestive pastel pink colouring that guides us towards the interior space of the body.