LenaLivCentroPecciPrato

The Center for Contemporary Art Luigi Pecci in collaboration with the Tel Aviv Museum of Art presents the first solo exhibition in an Italian museum of Russian / Israeli Lena Liv dall’evocativo while Hekhalòt enigmatic title. The term is taken from the Jewish cabala, and refers to “divine palace” in a mystical path between visible and invisible world.

The exhibition, curated by Artistic Director Marco Bazzini, will be held at the Centro Pecci from 25 September 2009 to January 10, 2010 to then stop at the museum in Tel Aviv in February next year.

Lena Liv used in a pictorial photographic images recovered at the stalls or in the archives to deprive them of their context and so find new depths of meaning. Process of alienation which, starting from private details not traceable to an individual allows the artist to create large installations in which everyone can identify. “I try not to represent but to give the feeling of something very close,” Lena says of his work, “intimate to us all at the same time incomprehensible. Wait or perhaps a promise, a doubt, a question. It ‘an attempt to sacralization of simplicity, simplicity and truth. ”

The imagery of Lena Liv is made of simple objects belonging to a universe past, faces of other times – as in the series devoted to patients of a psychiatric hospital or to that of children – and is always a representation of the archetypal world and time. His works are of great evocative power and emotion, memory involving the viewer in personal memories and at the same time given a new life that comes from afar.

All her subjects emerge, in a play of chiaroscuro, the depth of black that surrounds them and isolates them. Use of light as revelation and as a reference to the great tradition of Flemish painters which also incorporates the attention to detail.
The exhibition presents some forty works by the artist, many of large size, since the early nineties, the period of his full maturity, to the last project dedicated to the Moscow metro.

An original and valuable contribution to the reading of the works on show will be from a video of the prof. Haim Baharier among the major scholars of biblical hermeneutics and Jewish thought, for Garzanti author of “The genesis explained by my daughter” (2006) and “The turkey thinking” (2008).
Lena Liv and Haim Baharier have known and approached some years ago for an art project in which they both worked.
Liv’s work is heavily based on the concept of memory, and the diaspora implies a certain relationship with memory. Lena, as an artist, make this relationship through their own creations, Haim Baharier processes it through thought. Haim and Lena have thus begun a dialogue. “My job,” says Lena, has to do with some questions: what we remember, what we remove and what to save ”

Lena Liv (St. Petersburg, 1952) lives and works in Pietrasanta, New York and Tel Aviv, has participated in numerous personal and group exhibitions both in Italy and abroad. His works are in important public and private collections, some of which are present in the exhibition. In 1997 the Tel Aviv Museum of Art devoted to her first solo exhibition.

Haim Baharier (Paris, 1947) is called ‘the furnishing of precipices’ and is today among the leading scholars of biblical hermeneutics and Jewish thought. Mathematician and psychoanalyst was a student of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and Leon Ashkenazi Israel and the Master of Gur. His thought a bridge between the study of the Talmud, the development of traditional Kabbalist and activity consulting and training firm.

During the exhibition catalog will be published by the Experimental Center of Contemporary Art, which will be presented with a wide selection of his works will be accompanied by critical texts by Marco Bazzini, Artistic Director Centro Pecci, Mordechai Omer, Director, Tel Aviv Museum of Art , and Joseph Grilli, Angela Madesani, Robert Morgan and Alexander Borovsky, curators and art critics.