From Mount Zero to Lake One

From Mount Zero to Lake One

Oren Eliav, Solo Exhibition

Opening: Thursday, January 26, 7pm – 10pm

Braverman Gallery, Eilat 33, Tel Aviv

Exhibition dates: January 26 until April 13, 2023

In his new exhibition “From Mount Zero to Lake One”, Oren Eliav brings together 25 paintings from two cycles of work, “Lake One” and “Mount Zero”, which is exhibited in Israel for the first time.

Mount Zero is a wide cycle of works that was presented on the four floors of the well-known “BUILDING” gallery in Milan, in the midst of the Corona epidemic.  In these works, Eliav continued his engagement with the paintings of the 15th century Italian painter Giovanni Di Paolo, which began in his 2018 exhibition at the Israel Museum. Also here, at Braverman Gallery in Tel Aviv, the exhibition is arranged  as a choreography of paintings,  drawing the viewer’s awareness  to the space and time of looking, inviting an active observation from different distances and perspectives.

Lake One is an ongoing cycle of works that also began in lockdown and marks the beginning of the artist’s dialogue with AI based image synthesizers. Eliav creates digital images in a meticulous and long process, proceeding to paint them in oil on canvas in classical techniques. Through the manual act of painting, Eliav searches for the links between image and imagination, the human and the artificial and ultimately, between knowing and seeing.

Mount Zero is a mountain whose peak appears and disappears in an instant, constantly resetting to zero. Every mountain is a transient moment in time. Lake One, flat as a mirror, reflects the whole of reality; One thing at a time and everything at once

Oren Eliav’s works belong in numerous public collections including The National Gallery of Art, Washington; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Phillips Collection, Washington; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art;  Nicole Julien Mattei Collection, Paris; Ekard Art Foundation, Netherlands, Depardieu Collection, France; Tony Podesta Collection, Washington Among other private collections in Israel and abroad.

From Mount Zero to Lake One,
crossing a shoreless river.
Up a mountain that
peaks into zero.
To a reflecting lake
which mirrors
one thing at a time,
and everything at once.