“Cycles of Heaven and Earth” – A Retrospective

“Cycles of Heaven and Earth” is a retrospective exhibition of the art of Yitzhak Greenfield, an artist whose work spans almost sixty years: from his adolescence and early studies in New York, through his arrival in Israel and establishment as an artist on a kibbutz, and until his move to Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, where he has lived and worked since. The exhibition includes around 100 works– dating from the 1950′s until most recent ones. The works reflect wide cycles of artistic creation, which focus on the country’s landscapes and people, on heavenly and terrestrial Jerusalem, on the Hebrew alphabet and on central themes in Jewish tradition and culture. Greenfield constantly deals with the tension between figurative and abstract. He creates a unique symbolist array and forms a visual language, which rely upon both a Jewish and a modernistic iconography.The exhibition exposes the artist’s extraordinary continuous confrontation with the spiritual and material aspects of art.

– Gallery talk with the artist will take place on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 17:00

– The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue

more info:
at first
cupped hands
held the elixir of the dawn
afterwards
when noon was born
some madmen
assaulted the stone
with bare fingers
and others
with nails scored
ellipses and the spheres
of the first creation.

Shlomo Reich, 1974

A body of artworks of an artist is sometimes an extended expression of his vision spread over several decades, involving different landscapes and places and executed in a vast range of artistic means. The power of this kind of expression derives from its antecedents, its variations and the persistence and dedication of the artist. Above all, its strength lies in its capacity to capture the interest of the viewer time and time again.

This is the nature of the oeuvre of Yitzhak Greenfield, who came to Israel from the United States in 1951, lived in kibbutzim for more than a decade and finally settled in Jerusalem, his home for the past forty years. In many respects, Greenfield’s work represents a single cycle of creativity with two dominant features. One is his fascination with the city of Jerusalem – the celestial and the terrestrial – and the other is his fascination with the ways and means of making art, as he tirelessly explores all possibilities in drawing, pastels, watercolor, oil painting, printmaking, collage and mixed media.

Greenfield’s art has developed alongside his unique metaphysical and aesthetic quest for the sublime. His art has numerous sources of inspiration: The Bible, the Kabbalah, Jewish history and Middle Eastern archaeology, all complement his interest in art of the Far East, European Modernism and American Abstract Expressionism after The Second World War.

This retrospective exhibition chronologically presents Greenfield’s large series: beginning with paintings, drawings and prints created during the kibbutz years, in which he fervently depicts the country’s landscapes and people; continuing with central thematic series inspired by his passage to Jerusalem, including Black and White Light Jerusalem and Jerusalem Visions, alongside Ein Kerem landscape and still-life paintings; and ending with the Amulets, the Meditation Prints and the Geometric Ideograms series, in which he examines canonical subjects in Jewish culture and tradition. Greenfield’s artwork creates a unique array of images, which forms a visual language drawing upon both a Jewish and a Modernist iconography.

Greenfield’s oeuvre is cyclical in its form and content. It stems from his mystical experience as a child in New York and returns to it through the symbolism of Jerusalem, through the Kabbalah and through his preoccupation with history and the sources of mysticism. Greenfield: “In my paintings […] I’m looking again for that source, that light coming from inside the painting outwards – illumination with reference to identity, inspiration and Judaism. I feel very much a part of the journey of the Jewish people, its history and pageant, and I have been trying to express this in my art.”

If one sets Greenfield’s biography next to his artistic creation, one sees an artistic search for integration of his art and his concept of Judaism. The scope of his work presents an outstanding position between matter and spirit, between the secular and the religious and between the terrestrial and the celestial, while exploring the tension between the figurative and the abstract and between abstract lyricism and symbolic abstraction.

Art itself is for Greenfield a subject of constant revelation, examination, contemplation and intuition in the purely aesthetic sense. In his quest for the spiritual and mystical experience, he constantly questions and probes the very material of art itself.

Irena Gordon, curator