KÜNSTLERHAUS

BETHANIEN

Exhibition

Aharon Ozery

No sky no earth - but still snowflakes fall

In his works, Aharon Ozery is primarily interested in circular and recurrent processes. His installations, drawings and sculptures are concerned with mechanisms whose endlessly repetitive sequences of movement or cyclic structures create spaces free of purpose beyond our material reality. In most cases, this reveals a discrepancy in Ozery’s installations between their industrially shaped appearance – and the functionality associated with this by the viewer – and their actual ‘uselessness’ from the material standpoint. Ozery’s works operate in a cosmos that survives without legitimisation via any specific purpose, and in which every act is part of a fixed, endlessly repeated sequence in a similar way to a ritual.

As the motto for his exhibition in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Ozery chose a haiku-poem written by Japanese poet Hanshin in the 19th century. In the eyes of the artist, the graceful aesthetics and simultaneous compact verse structure of the haiku reflect a harmony that can be found in a different medium in his large-format sculpture produced in Berlin – a ‘machine’ which can only be perceived as such when contemplated more fully, and yet an object which is not a machine at all in the sense of having any productive purpose. Far more, it can be experienced as a space within a space, its inner life accessible via surprising insights; a sculpture making the potential of movement towards a centre comprehensible.

Exhibition
25.03. – 17.04.2011
Tue - Sun: 2 - 7pm
Admission free

Opening
24.03.2011
7 - 10 pm

Aharon Ozery is an artist in residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien as a grantee of the Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, and of Artis – Contemporary Israeli Art Fund, New York.