ISRAEL HERSHBERG

The title of the exhibition, IMAGO, anchors Hershberg’s painterly work within a theological-philosophical context alluding to the biblical ‘Imago Dei’ of the Garden of Eden and the creation of Man, as described in the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. In addition to conveying the image of the world in its natural, pure state, the title points to the consequences and implications of transforming the world into an image, a picture. As such, it indicates a withdrawal from the world, a substitution, and to some extent, cancellation of it. The title reconfirms the mysterious irreducible quality of painting, even realist, with regard to the represented world it both reflects and conceals.

Hershberg’s mimetic landscapes are tied to specific sights and locations, but at the same time they are also independent mental images. They re-establish pictorial subjectivity without employing expressionistic aesthetics. As manifested in a painting like View from Giglio – Fall (2023), where the green foliage of the trees and the mountains stretch from side to side and are cropped by the frame, Hershberg’s landscapes are both contained and expansive, concurrently a totality and a segment of an infinite continuum; encapsulation as well as segmentation implying extension and boundlessness.

Hershberg’s reference to Italian Renaissance painting highlights the tension within his pictorial practice between timelessness and contingency. His practice explores the validity of canonical modes of representation. It confronts the spectators with the possibility of ahistorical painterly vision, seeking to reveal that which defeats, or is subjected to, the permutations of time. In a different way to a contemporary realist painter like Franz Gertsch (1930-2022), who utilised handmade likeness to process the impact of photography and technical representation on painting, Hershberg is interested in the enduring aspects of painting. However, one cannot easily reduce Hershberg’s project to nostalgic, or rather, classicist, aestheticist terms. His project (re)humanises our vision of the world—of nature. It has a holistic, restorative potential, and in this sense, it is political. It is an act of re-imagining—of correcting and transfiguring.

In contrast to Bertolt Brecht’s poem To Those Born After (An die Nachgeborenen) (1939), where the German writer states that there are times in which ‘A conversation about trees is almost a crime / Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!,’ Hershberg’s recent landscapes turn a plastic/visual conversation about trees into a utopian scenario, which supersedes our politically dictated social reality. They introduce, uncover, and somehow retrieve the world we left unnoticed and seem to have forgotten.

Press release courtesy Galeria Plan B, Berlin. Text: Ory Dessau.