A Delicate Matter

Curator: Adi Gura

Braverman Gallery is pleased to invite you to ‘A Delicate Matter’, a new solo exhibition by Joshua Neustein.

The show takes its point of departure from the meaning of the word ‘erasure’ and the action of erasure, the cruelty of erasure and the fear of erasure. The intention behind Neustein works meaning of erasure, not in the sense of representations of violence in journalism, but rather the poetics of violence as in Artaud, DeSade or  Stanley Kubric’s “Eyes Wide Shut”, “Clockwork Orange” or “The Shining”.

The drawings are 132 x 102 cm with glassine envelopes that contain the rubbings. These glassine envelopes with the remnants of the process of erasure are crucial to the erased drawings. Some of these works were made last month, others 45 years ago. Although made in another era, in other contexts – the intention brings them together to the gallery space. Many of Neustein’s works are in the process of change, sometimes decades after they were dated. He keeps changing, that way the works escape a specific time limit.

Erasure leaves a history, a trace or specter of what was. It is about the back-and-forth between preservation, maintenance and negation, denial, repudiation. In other words  it’s Heidegger’s notion of Sous Rature (1). It is to say wait, linger awhile, maintain the debt, the right, the specter that is here but has taken the place of something that was, but is not, said and not said. The different elements in the exhibition are dealing with this idea: the erasers, the stubby leftovers of making erased drawings, or an installation of drop cloth (nylon) with sticks, entitled “Anamorphic Skull”, which references the distortion of the skull in Holbein’s painting “The Ambassadors”(1533). next to all this A black cube covered (finished) with graphite, waiting for something to happen. This perception of time is a part on Neustein’s ability to express the inevitable, whether they creates situations of hope or despair, either way they diminish illusions. (2)

The “scotch-tape” pieces are narrative annulments and reinforcements. They are overt messages that gaze at public erasures, meeting between minimal concrete imagery, meditative posture, and events with a global impact. Gilbert Rolf (3) writes in this context: “It is important that we experience Neustein’s work as installed, which is to say, as impermanent. This property is fundamental to its discursive, or propositional, character. Its is an impermanence which underlines the point of the “situational” bias of epistemic abstraction. The point is this: in order that the work be seen to operate in ad through an interaction with “real” space, it is necessary that the space be altered without losing its original identity, that is, that its transformation be conditional rather than absolute..”

The work;“The Knife of Essad Bey” responds to Lev Nussimbaum’s final fatal ironic death in Italy,1942. The Knife has a faux holographic edge imposed on a real knife edge and is stabbed into the top of a wooden pedestal. The holographic sharp edge quickened into a poetics of violence. Lev Nussimbaum converted from Judaism to Islam in 1922 and adopted thel Islamic name
of Essad Bey. He denied his origins, wrote the foundational novel of Azerbaijan and was a celebrated Orientalist.ֿ He died in Italy in 1942 from dropping a knife on his foot and letting it fester and gangrene.

In the video work: “Erasures”(1971-1973) that is shown in The Bakery, the artist’s hand appears sketching the word erasure while erasing it in the same time.

Joshua Neustein (B. 1940), lives and works in New-York, Neustein holds a BA from City College, New York and exhibits in frequently in Israel and abroad since the seventies.

Neustein has shown his work in numerous solo exhibitions among them at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York, Curated by: Nicholas Serota; Gallerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, France; Untitled gallery, New York;, The Israel Museum Jerusalem; Rose Art Museum, Boston; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Mary Boone Gallery, New York; the Venice Biennale Israeli Pavilion, Venice, Italy and more.

Group exhibitions include the Metropolitan Museum, New York; House of Kunst, Munich, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Stadtisch Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, Germany; Documenta Kassel, Germany; Luisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv; National Museum for Modern Art, Tokyo; Barbican center for Theatre, Dance and Art, London, the Martin Gropius Bao, Berlin, and more

Over the course of the years

Over the course of the years Neustein has been awarded in different prizes, among them the Guggenheim Fellowship, from the Dr. Georg and Josi Guggenheim Foundation; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Ernest Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Jerusalem.

1. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, World, Finitude, Solitude, Translated by William Mcneill, Nicholas Walker, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1995
2. Jaromir Jedlinski, Neustein, Drawing in the Margins, Edited by Meira Perry-Lehmann, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2012
3. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and John Johnston, Gravity’s Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty, (Conclusion), October, ⅓, (Spring 1977), Neustein, Drawing in the Margins, Edited by Meira Perry-Lehmann, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2012