Yaacov Agam: Oeuvres 1962-2006

Espace Meyer Zafra is pleased to announce an exhibition dedicated to the innovative work of Yaacov Agam. From March 11 to May 06, 2023, the exhibition will bring together paintings and sculptures from the 1960s to the 2000s.

 

In 1980, the famous Italian art critic, Giulo Carlo Argan referred to the work of the Israeli artist: «Agam’s oeuvre is certainly one of the outstanding phenomena of European artistic culture since the Second World War.».

 

Painter, sculptor, graphic designer, videographer, Yaacov Agam explores all the mediums at his disposal in order to introduce the fourth dimension into art, that of time combined with movement.

 

“[My] works [...] reflect the efforts I have made to go beyond the limits of expression which until now have given the pictorial event an ineluctably frozen character. I have endeavored, in fact, to create a painting existing not only in space, but also in the time where it develops and evolves, thus producing a predictable infinity of plastic situations arising from each other and whose successive appearances and disappearances provide ever-renewed revelations. The introduction of the dimension of time, duration and continuity into the pictorial event allows us to penetrate more deeply into the essence of a work which, despite (or rather because of) its external transformations, even better retains its organic unity and its unalterable inner identity.". - Yaakov Agam

The strict process that Agam adopts in his work is found in all of his works throughout his artistic career. It is impossible to distinguish a particular phase of its activity without considering the development of the whole. During his first personal exhibition at the Craven Gallery in 1953, Agam inaugurated his first «transformable paintings». The individual wooden elements can be moved in relation to each other by being displaced around the wooden surface. There is a constant interplay between the background, which literally acts as a support, and the protruding forms, which resolve into different overall images depending on the viewer’s activity. On the occasion of our exhibition, we will have the pleasure of presenting the work Homage to an Assemblage Mouvant (2006), a notorious example of his «transformable paintings».

 

From the end of the 1950s, Agam began his relief work; work mixing pictorial and sculptural approaches. The surfaces of these paintings are constituted in parallel triangular reliefs upon which different themes are painted. Agam explains: «I end up painting as many as eight distinct paintings in the same work : they can be seen integrated into one another if you are stationed directly in front of the painting, and they can be seen separating and recomposing themselves in turn when you move toward the right or toward the left.». On the occasion of this exhibition, we will have the pleasure of presenting 4 small paintings, Spiral Oval (1966), End to continuity (1970), Red Movement (1962), Untitled (1969), produced with absolutely incredible precision, as well as only two important paintings, Two (1973-1975) and Metzulot (1980-2007).

His painted or sculpted works, always in the process of becoming, favor form and color in movement over the static and the frozen and associate the spectator with the work of creation. Former Salomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Director Thomas M. Messer describes this: “Multi-faced reality projections are Agam’s search and attainment. He proceeds from certain basic assumptions holding that : reality is hidden beneath appearances and is in that sense «abstract» ; that while it may be total in the divine view, it remains fragmented and changeable to mortals ; that perceptible reality fragments may be in simultaneous, parallel, overlapping, harmonic or contrapuntal evidence ; that reality is perceivable not as static material by as moving, kinetic energy ; and that visibility and reality maintain a mutative ratio to each other».

Within this exhibition, the experience of the viewer takes a prominent place in the creation of the work. Through movement or manual action, the viewer is invited to participate fully in the experience of the work.