Shahar Marcus, solo show, ‘Self Print’ at Hermann Struck Museum, Haifa

‘Self Print’ opens April 6 and will run until October 15, 2017.

Shahar Marcus is a performance artist focusing on video and performance works. In this exhibition he presents video works made in recent years, alongside prints based on frames taken from those works. In the course of this process, the moving image becomes a static one. The ability to reproduce images is fundamental to prints, as it is to the art of printmaking. But through slight changes between the prints, such as a light addition of color, a removal of certain elements, or a change of hue, the artist invites the viewer to draw closer and locate the unique qualities of each print.

Marcus chose to work in the printmaking technique in order to transfer his video works to a different medium so as to charge them with additional layers of meaning. The video work Leap of Faith, for example, was inspired by the iconic leap of artist Yves Klein. In its version as a print work, it draws inspiration from the combination of bicycle and musical notes appearing in Marcel Duchamp’s drawing To Have the Apprentice in the Sun. In this work, a cycler is depicted pedaling up a hill against the background of an empty page of notes, his motion uphill reminiscent of a rising musical scale. In two of Marcus’s prints, the image of a cycler appears superimposed on the notes of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, which accompanied Marcus’s video work Homecoming Artist. In this way the print diverges from the video work’s original contexts, revealing new meanings.

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