Zelig Segal’s exhibition “Masonite” Curated by Sigalit Landau
Zelig Segal, known as a first-class modern Judaica designer, who dealt a lot with minimalist sculpture in the 80s, abandoned both the design and the sculpture for intense color paintings in large formats (100×200 cm). The exhibition includes large works, in an abstract expressive style, from the last ten years.
This is the first time Sigalit Landau is Curating an exhibition, creating a fascinating path for the viewer to see Zelig Segal abstract works in the space designed especialy for this show by Dan Hasson. In the picture you can see Zelig Segals’ works and part of Sigalit Landau installation (detail). Sigalit Landau (b. 1969) exhibited all around the world, won in 1993 the JNF award, and going to present Israel in the 2011 Venice Biannale.
“Selig Segal cares about ethics no less than he cares about aesthetics,” ascertained Yigal Zalmona. The austere minimalism and his desire for an exposed concreteness that reveals the characteristics of material and form, his avoidance of any ornament or twist and his renouncement of color became what Zalmona identified as “the central values of a moral conception that guides Segal’s work.” The same austere, moral Segal whose guiding light is the “truth of matter” and who acknowledges the arbitrariness of the signified action, however, gazed at the Modernist ethos from both ends and transformed the moral equation. Modernism’s duality – simultaneously attracted to progress and the future and longing for the primitive and the native, acknowledging both austerity and expressivity – lead Segal to view meaning and liberty as equal poles in one equation: diametric oppositions of authentic gestures maintaining their connection to a basis of absolute internal truth.
The later Segal, now in his 80’s, continues to long to the “secrets” of matter, as Zalmona put it; but the material itself has been replaced: no longer wood, paper or metal, but masonite, paint and pigment. Not dry, hard materials, but rather moist, fluid ones. Not a solid object that offers resistance, but a flexible, yielding mixture… Segal remains well within the confines of the abstract language. He is also still true to a stock of recurring actions, still an avid Modernist in search of a kernel of truth. But rather than surveying Modernism from the heights of its disciplined purity, as he did before, Segal has opted in his later years for a space of internal liberty with whose force he vacillates freely between momentous pictorial associations, devoting himself to the one element that had been left out of his works’ scope, namely color.
Segal – the elegant and stylized designer and the conscious, minimalist sculptor – seems to be a man who has left the body of knowledge of the skilled craftsman and the rules under which he was educated behind him, entering a space of unknown adventure beyond time and profession. He seems to belong to a select few artists whose old age allows for internal liberty rather than a rehearsal of imitation and reproduction mechanisms. The audacity of freedom and the ability to arrive at it effortlessly imbue the later chapter of his work with a strength and freshness immeasurable by such period brands as ‘postmodernism’ or ‘the return to painting’. (Tali Tamir, in the catalog’s text)
New show at the Kishon gallery, opened in Jaffa Port, 23 April – 8 May.
