Moshe Gershuni

Gershuni, Moshe
(b Tel Aviv, 1936).
Israeli painter and printmaker. He studied at the Avni Art Institute in Tel Aviv from 1960 to 1964 and taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (1972--7) and at the Art Teachers' Training College in Ramat Hasharon (from 1978). Taking as his subject-matter the cultural, social and political myths that embody Israeli life, Gershuni was one of the first Israeli artists to practise conceptual art and performance art in the late 1960s, first questioning the nature of art and later the structure of society as manifested in cultural and political coercion; at the Venice Biennale in 1980 he exhibited an installation, Red Sealing/Theatre, in which an entire room was devoted to texts in Hebrew on the theme of 'Who Is a Zionist and Who Is Not?'. His themes in the 1980s ranged from the unknown soldier to the plight of the Jew forced to assimilate into a hostile society. His I Am a Soldier series (e.g. Soldier! Soldier!, 1981; see 1986 exh. cat., no. 11) incorporates these and other phrases into an exuberantly expressionist handling of paint explicitly reminiscent of blood. Gershuni touched also on such issues as immigration and the transplantation of European into Israeli culture; to these ends he often included images of waving flags in paintings such as Arise! Ye Starvelings from Your Slumbers (1984; Switzerland, Charles Majorkas priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., no. 14), representing them with fluid and luridly coloured brushstrokes, or linked political dramas with timeless allusions to the Hebrew Bible. He explored similar themes and gestural techniques in screenprints and in large etchings such as the Kaddish series, for example Honoured (790×760 mm, 1984; Jerusalem, Israel Mus.).
SUSAN T. GOODMAN

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