New exhibitions at the Haifa Museum of Art - Shusterman Collection and solo exhibitions of Natalia Zorbova and Hila Spitzer

The new exhibitions at the Haifa Museum of Art are a tribute to Israeli creativity through the ages, from the establishment of Bezalel in 1906 to contemporary art, and in a time of mourning and loss they present local creativity as a source of cultural resilience.

Watch◄ Shusterman collection and solo exhibitions of Natalia Zorbova and Hila Spitzer

The exhibition "At home: the abode of loves and anxieties", seeks at this challenging time to provide visitors with a safe space to contemplate the horror that attacks our homes, a space of beauty that contains the beloved things that our homes treasure.

The exhibition "Sobbat Shemesh Admati" presents a collection recently donated by the Shusterman Foundation - Israel to the Haifa Museum of Art, which has begun to support the museum on an ongoing basis, mainly Israeli art from the first decades of the 20th century. Haifa Museums: Shusterman Collection and solo exhibitions of Natalia Zorbova and Hila Spitzer ( Photo: Hai Pa-TV)

Opening event:

• Date" Thursday 1.2.24
• Time: 19:00
• Admission to the general public is free
• Exhibition closing date: 30.6.24

An Earthy Sun Spinner: Shusterman Collection at the Museum

• Participating artists: Pinchas Abramowitz, Gilad Ofir, Nachum Gutman, Haim Glicksberg, Pavel Walberg, Anna Tycho, Mordechai Lebanon, Ephraim Moshe Lelain, Zvi Meyrowitz, Yohanan Simon, Israel Peladi, Moshe Kupferman, Reuven Rubin and works in Bezalel
• Curator: Limor Alperan

The group of works presented in the exhibition, the generous gift of Mrs. Lynn Shusterman to the museum collection, includes mainly works from the first half of the 20th century, the period of the formation of Israeli art.

The Shusterman Foundation - Israel will also continue to support the Haifa Art Museum on an ongoing basis. The donated collection underwent in-depth conservation and research, which enabled the presentation of rare works in the exhibition. For example, thanks to conservation work, a two-sided work by Nachum Gutman from the 30s was discovered.

The exhibition is the starting point for a journey through the history of Israeli painting, which continues to the museum's permanent display which focuses on Israeli painting from the 2000s to XNUMX, and ends with the rotating exhibitions on the top floor of the museum, which focuses on contemporary Israeli paintings. Educational activities and unique audio guides for children or adults created for the exhibitions will lead young and old visitors through the history of Israeli art.

CEO of Haifa Museums, Yotam Yakir:

Haifa museums responded to the war from the very beginning, understanding that this is our mission in times of hardship. In recent months, we have initiated hundreds of respite and enrichment activities for the families of the evacuees and all over Haifa, to enable an island of sanity. Even now, all Haifa museums continue to be open to the reservists and families who were evacuated from their homes, free of charge. The Haifa Art Museum has been undergoing a dramatic content change in recent years. I welcome a new and wonderful exhibition season and thank Lynn Shusterman and the Shusterman Foundation - Israel for the strategic partnership and the expression of trust in the Haifa Art Museum, which for us means a lot.

At home: the abode of love and anxieties

• Participating artists: Ira Eduardovna, Aram Gershoni, Eduar Vayar, Zion Avraham Hazan, Uriel Miron and Hilla Spitzer
• Curator: Dr. Kobi Ben-Meir

Our homes are usually home to our most favorite people and things, and the description of the interior of the house shows everything that we love and that we are anxious for its safety. On the 7th of October, anxiety erupted with full force into the sheltered home of Israelis; The exhibition seeks to express the comfort of gathering in the domestic space and the fear of what threatens to disrupt its stability.

Describing the interior of the house has a place of honor in the history of painting. The seemingly innocuous subject has often been an ideal platform for experimenting with new modes of pictorial expression, since it does not require more than intimacy between the artist, his environment and the objects in it.

Édouard Vuillard, one of the greatest French artists of the early 20th century, formulated a new painting language in his avant-garde paintings. As part of the exhibition, no less than ten extraordinary works by Weyer from various collections were brought together, and their display is a rare opportunity in Israel to examine a generous selection of his works together. Alongside him, the exhibition presents five contemporary Israeli artists who examine domestic environments and questions concerning painting itself. Their probing eye observes mundane objects such as soup bowls, carpets and chairs, and finds beauty, meaning and memories in them.

The chief curator of the Haifa Art Museum, Dr. Kobi Ben-Meir:

About three years ago, the Haifa Museum of Art began an in-depth process of critically examining its collection, re-evaluating it and working on its expansion. The Shusterman collection, which includes masterpieces from the beginning of the twentieth century, joins the existing collection in the museum and gives expression to all the different schools of thought that have been active in Israel since the founding of Bezalel in 1906. This body of works adds a very significant artistic and historical layer to the museum's existing collection, which focuses mostly on Israeli art from the 50s onwards.

In this exhibition season, Israeli art from the past is read in relation to contemporary work. The exhibition "At Home: The House of Love and Anxieties" presents a body of work by five contemporary Israeli artists, who focus on the interior of their home. The interior of the home will be examined in the exhibition as a place that centers all the things we love and are anxious about their fate, feelings that have become especially acute in recent months.

Making the video "Sloky"

One of the interesting works in the exhibition is the video work "Sloki" by Zion Avraham Hazan that will be shown in the exhibition, which was filmed in 2019 in the dining room of Kibbutz Bari. Four men sit around a holiday table in the dining room and present four different perspectives on a case of shooting and injury from our forces in Nahal Saluki in Lebanon. The film takes on additional meaning following the Shiv'a massacre in October, two of the film's participants were murdered on that Sabbath.

At the BFAMI gallery for the whole family, dedicated to children's activities, "My own room" is presented, the result of a collaboration between the artist Hila Spitzer and the architect Ariel Armoni. Children and adults will be invited to draw their room, or the room of their dreams, on pages the size of a postcard, and place their room inside one of the windows of designed buildings, inside a gallery whose entire walls will be painted by Hila Spitzer.

Natalia Zorbova lives in painting

• Solo exhibition for Natalia Zorbova
• Curator: Dr. Kobi Ben-Meir

In the main hall of the museum, and in direct relation to the exhibition "In the House: The House of Love and Anxieties", a solo exhibition of the artist Natalia Zorbova will be presented. Zorbova was born in Moscow in 1975, immigrated to Israel in 2004 and lives in Jaffa. In 2011, she was one of the founders of the "New Barbizon" collective, and her solo exhibitions were presented, among others, at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2019), and Artport, Tel Aviv (2023).

The exhibition is dedicated to large-scale oil paintings of the interior of Zorbova's house. In all the different places she lived, whether it was in Moscow, Berlin or Jaffa, Natalia Zorbova mainly painted the interior of her house.

Looking at the living environment is a means of adapting to it, and through painting Zorbova discovers the place; Zorbova excels at building complex compositions in large formats - perhaps the biggest challenge in painting. In the history of art, such a size is mostly reserved for historical paintings, and it can be said that her works are historical paintings about seemingly unimportant stories, against the background of domestic spaces inhabited by chairs, carpets and flower pots.

The spaces she paints bear traces of small events and memories: a coat someone left on a chair, laundry waiting to be folded, or a painting painted years ago and hanging on the wall. Zurbova's subject is the unplanned occurrences of life in the domestic space, which drain into potential compositions.

Piranzi: Mirrors of Rome

• Giovanni Battista Piranzi: 1720, Republic of Venice – 1778, Rome
• Curator: Dr. Kobi Ben-Meir

The exhibition will feature 17 etchings by the great Italian artist from the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Piranzi, which underwent a restoration process in the last year. Piranzi was active in Rome in the middle of the 18th century - a time when the city attracted educated people from all over Europe, who met against the backdrop of glorious centuries-old buildings.

In Piranesi's compositions, relics from antiquity, churches from the early Middle Ages, magnificent buildings from the Renaissance and figures from the 18th century appear side by side. All these are arranged together in a jumble, which presents Rome as an archaeological mound of knowledge and life. Piranzi's compositions radiate nostalgia for the splendor of the past, in the heavy shadow of which his contemporaries can only contemplate with melancholy the buildings that were and were destroyed.