Ori Gersht (born 1967) is an Israeli

fine art photographer Fine-art photography is photography created in line with the vision of the photographer as artist, using photography as a medium for creative expression. The goal of fine-art photography is to express an idea, a message, or an emotion. This stand ...

. He is a professor of photography at the

University for the Creative Arts The University for the Creative Arts is a specialist art and design university in the south of England. It was formed in 2005 as University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester when the Kent Inst ...

Rochester Rochester may refer to: Places Australia * Rochester, Victoria Canada * Rochester, Alberta United Kingdom *Rochester, Kent ** City of Rochester-upon-Medway (1982–1998), district council area ** History of Rochester, Kent ** HM Prison ...

, Kent, England.

Biography

Ori Gersht was born in Tel Aviv. He graduated in Photography, Film and Video from

University of Westminster , mottoeng = The Lord is our Strength , type = Public , established = 1838: Royal Polytechnic Institution 1891: Polytechnic-Regent Street 1970: Polytechnic of Central London 1992: University of Westminster , endowment = £5.1 million ...

, London and studied for an M.A. in Photography from the

Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom. It offe ...

, London.

Art career

Gersht has exhibited widely in museums and galleries since the early 1990s. He is represented by Angles Gallery in Los Angeles, CRG Gallery in New York, Ben Brown Fine Arts in London, an
Noga Gallery
in Tel Aviv. In 2012, Gersht's show ''History Repeating'' was mounted at the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

Artistic themes

Gersht engages the themes of life, death, violence, and beauty. His photographs and films transcribe images of sites of historical significance—the

Judean Desert The Judaean Desert or Judean Desert ( he, מִדְבַּר יְהוּדָה, Midbar Yehuda}, both ''Desert of Judah'' or ''Judaean Desert''; ar, صحراء يهودا, Sahraa' Yahuda) is a desert in Palestine and Israel that lies east of Jerusal ...

Sarajevo Sarajevo ( ; cyrl, Сарајево, ; ''see Names of European cities in different languages (Q–T)#S, names in other languages'') is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population of 275,524 in its a ...

Auschwitz Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...

, the Galicia region of

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...

, the Lister Route in the

Pyrenees The Pyrenees (; es, Pirineos ; french: Pyrénées ; ca, Pirineu ; eu, Pirinioak ; oc, Pirenèus ; an, Pirineus) is a mountain range straddling the border of France and Spain. It extends nearly from its union with the Cantabrian Mountains to C ...

(on which

Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mys ...

made his ill-fated exodus from Nazi-occupied France)—into ciphers of psychological disruption. Such scenes may not seem out of the ordinary unto themselves, but, through the artist’s focused attention and treatment they evoke the emotional resonance of what has transpired—most often, violence, and, more significantly, the ghosts of war’s most egregious detritus, its refugees. Pervasive in Gersht’s work is the

landscape A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...

, as a place, an idea, and an art historical trope. His films and photographs may be compared to paintings in their display—from their unhindered access (no Plexiglas separates their surfaces from the viewer) to the frames surrounding the monitors on which the films often play. Moreover, the vistas and horizons of, for instance, "Between Places" (1998–2000), "White Noise" (1999–2000), "The Clearing/Liquidation" (2005), and "Evaders" (2009), recall Romantic depictions of the sublime. They conjure precedents in both photography, such as the vistas of

Andreas Gursky Andreas Gursky (born 15 January 1955) is a German photographer and professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany. He is known for his large format architecture and landscape colour photographs, often using a high point of view. His works ...

and the landscapes of the American South by

Sally Mann Sally Mann HonFRPS (born Sally Turner Munger; May 1, 1951) is an American photographer who has made large format black and white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death. Early life and e ...

, and painting, by

J.M.W. Turner Joseph Mallord William Turner (23 April 177519 December 1851), known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbule ...

Caspar David Friedrich Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscape ...

, and even

Mark Rothko Mark Rothko (), born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz (russian: Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич, link=no, lv, Markuss Rotkovičs, link=no; name not Anglicized until 1940; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was a Latv ...

. In his

still life A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly wikt:inanimate, inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or artificiality, m ...

series Gersht investigated the relationships between

photography Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed ...

technology Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...

and optical perception, at a pivotal moment in the history of photography where

digital technology Digital technology may refer to: * Application of digital electronics * Any significant piece of knowledge from information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange al ...

both threatens a crisis and promises a breakthrough. Research into the early history of the medium of photography is brought together with theoretical discourse, creating, still image and films that (literally) explode the genre of still life, the beautiful and destructive results captured using cutting-edge technology. In "Pomegranate", a film that references

Juan Sanchez Cotan ''Juan'' is a given name, the Spanish and Manx versions of ''John''. It is very common in Spain and in other Spanish-speaking communities around the world and in the Philippines, and also (pronounced differently) in the Isle of Man. In Spanish, ...

’s 17th-century still life and Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photography, a high velocity bullet flies across the frame in slow motion and obliterates a suspended

pomegranate The pomegranate (''Punica granatum'') is a fruit-bearing deciduous shrub in the family Lythraceae, subfamily Punicoideae, that grows between tall. The pomegranate was originally described throughout the Mediterranean Basin, Mediterranean re ...

fruit, bursting it open and wheeling it slowly into the air like a smashed violated mouth spraying seeds. A peaceful image is transformed into bloodshed, and a dialogue is established between stillness and motion, peace and violence. Gersht’s photographs and films provide a meditation on life, loss, destiny and chance. Allusions to the catastrophic violence of the

French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considere ...

, the

Spanish Civil War The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, lin ...

, the bombing of

Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui h ...

, and the suicide bombs that Gersht anticipated during his childhood in

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

can all be found in this work. As such, it reminds us of our past, present, and future, and, above all, the fragility of life itself.

Awards and recognitions

* 1990 South Bank Photo Show, London * 1993 Department of Transport Art Competition, London * 1997 Residency at Whitefield School, Barnet * 2000 The Constantiner Photographer Award for an Israeli Artist,

Tel Aviv Tel Aviv-Yafo ( he, תֵּל־אָבִיב-יָפוֹ, translit=Tēl-ʾĀvīv-Yāfō ; ar, تَلّ أَبِيب – يَافَا, translit=Tall ʾAbīb-Yāfā, links=no), often referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the G ...

Museum of Art,

* 2002 Consultant to the Architectural Development Planning of the South London Gallery * 2004 First Prize winner, Onfuri International, Tirana, Albania

Solo exhibitions

* 2014 - ''Ori Gersht: Still Life'',

Columbus Museum of Art The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Formed in 1878 as the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (its name until 1978), it was the first art museum to register its charter with the state of Ohio. The museum collect ...

, USA * 2014 - ''Ori Gersht: Portraits'', Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, USA * 2014 - ''All Will Come To Pass'',

The Center for Contemporary Art ''The'' () is a grammatical Article (grammar), article in English language, English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite ...

, Tel Aviv, Israel * 2012 - ''History Repeating'',

, USA. * 2012 - ''This Storm is What We Call Progress'',

Imperial War Museum Imperial War Museums (IWM) is a British national museum organisation with branches at five locations in England, three of which are in London. Founded as the Imperial War Museum in 1917, the museum was intended to record the civil and military ...

, London. * 2011 - ''Lost in Time'', Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, USA * 2009 - ''Black Box'',

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was des ...

, Washington DC, USA * 2008 - ''Selected Films'',

, Washington, USA * 2008 - ''The Forest'', Musée d’Art de Toulon, Toulon, France * 2008 - ''Pomegranate'', The Jewish Museum, New York * 2007 - ''Time After Time: Exploding Flowers & Other Matters'', The Armory Show (with CRG Gallery), New York, USA * 2007 - ''The Forest & Blow Up'',

Yale Center for British Art Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the worl ...

, New Haven, USA * 2006 - ''The Forest'',

Tel Aviv Museum of Art Tel Aviv Museum of Art ( he, מוזיאון תל אביב לאמנות ''Muzeon Tel Aviv Leomanut'') is an art museum in Tel Aviv, Israel. The museum is dedicated to the preservation and display of modern and contemporary art from Israel and aroun ...

, Tel Aviv, Israel * 2006 - ''The Clearing'',

The Photographers' Gallery The Photographers' Gallery was founded in London by Sue Davies opening on 14 January 1971, as the first public gallery in the United Kingdom devoted solely to photography. It is also home to the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, established in ...

, London, UK * 2004 - ''History in the Making'', Photo España, Madrid, Spain * 2002 - ''Afterglow'', Art Now Room,

Tate Britain Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in ...

, London, UK * 2002 - ''Afterglow'', Helena Rubenstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art,

, Tel Aviv, Israel

Group exhibitions

* 2012 - ''Seduced by Art'',

National Gallery The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director o ...

, London * 2011 - ''Evaders & Falling Bird'',

, Israel * 2011 - ''When a Painting Moves… Something Must be Rotten'', The Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway * 2011 - ''Eating Art'',

Casa Milà Casa Milà (, ), popularly known as ''La Pedrera'' (, ; "the stone quarry") in reference to its unconventional rough-hewn appearance, is a '' Modernista'' building in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was the last private residence designed by arc ...

, Barcelona, Spain * 2010 - ''Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance'',

Guggenheim Museum The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Museums in this group include: Locations Americas * The Solomon R. Guggenhei ...

, New York, USA * 2010 - ''Still / Moving'', The

Israel Museum The Israel Museum ( he, מוזיאון ישראל, ''Muze'on Yisrael'') is an art and archaeological museum in Jerusalem. It was established in 1965 as Israel's largest and foremost cultural institution, and one of the world’s leading encyclopa ...

, Jerusalem * 2010 - ''Beijing International Art Biennale 2010'', National At Museum, Beijing, China * 2010 - ''Atlantis II'', Rohkunstbau, Berlin, Germany * 2010 - ''Paysage'', Musée d’Art, Toulon, France * 2009 - ''Hugging and Wrestling: Contemporary Israeli Photography and Video'',

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make thes ...

, USA * 2009 - ''Flower Power'', Villa Giulia – Centro Ricerca Arte Attuale, Turin, Italy * 2009 - ''Cuando una pintura se mueve... algo debe estar podrido!''
Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico
San Juan, Puerto Rico * 2008 - ''Pomegranate'': The Jewish Museum, New York, USA * 2008 - ''Mutation II'', Paris, Kulturprojekte, Berlin, Fotofo, Bratislave, Vladmir Und Estragon, Vienna, Association Café Crème, Luxembourg, Musee de la Photographie, Moscou, Zone Attive, Rome * 2007 - ''Video Killed the Painting Star'', Museum of Salamanca, Spain * 2007 - ''In Focus: Living History'',

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...

, London * 2007 - ''Single Shot'',

, London * 2007 - ''1st Architecture, Art and Landscape Biennial of the Canaries'', Canary Islands, Spain * 2006 - ''Inside-Out: Contemporary Artists from Israel'', Museum MARCO, Vigo, Spain * 2006 - ''Forest Primeval'', MOCA (GA), Atlanta, USA * 2006 - ''Twillight: Photography in the Magic Hour'',

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

, London * 2005 - ''Dreams and Trauma'',

Haus der Kulturen der Welt The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), in English House of the World's Cultures, in Berlin is Germany's national center for the presentation and discussion of international contemporary arts, with a special focus on non-European cultures and so ...

, Berlin, Germany * 2003 - ''One Ground'',

California Museum of Photography The UCR/California Museum of Photography (CMP) is an off-campus institution and department of the UCR College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at University of California, Riverside, the Uni ...

, Riverside, USA * 2002 - ''Reality Check: Recent Developments in British Photography and Video'', curated by Kate Bush and Brett Rogers, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic * 2002 - ''Non-Places'',

Frankfurter Kunstverein The Frankfurt Art Association (german: link=no, Frankfurter Kunstverein) is an art museum founded in 1829 by a group of influential citizens of the city of Frankfurt, Germany. The aim of the institution is to support the arts in the city, which w ...

, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Gersht, Ori Israeli photographers Living people Jewish artists People from Tel Aviv Israeli expatriates in the United Kingdom 1967 births Academics of the University for the Creative Arts Israeli contemporary artists Fine art photographers