Izhar PatkinThe Wandering Veil

The Wandering Veil is a long-awaited survey of the pioneering works of Israeli-born artist Izhar Patkin who has lived and worked in the United States since 1977. The exhibition pivots around a monumental project of the last decade, but also includes important early work from Patkin’s 30-year career. The exhibition opens with the colorful and flamboyant Don Quijote Segunda Parte (1987), whose rear is rather humorously the statue’s front view. The anodized aluminum figure of Cervantes’ fictional character doubles as a portrait of the legendary New York Times architecture critic and Patkin’s close friend, Herbert Muschamp. Mounted near the top of the gallery stairs, with an elevated viewpoint that evokes the “cavalier perspective,” Patkin’s Don Quijote offers viewers important clues about the exhibition unfolding below: first, it is a journey and a story; second, it is a query about how fiction and visual representation shape reality; and, most significantly, it repeatedly challenges the underlying ideologies of pictorial space. The heart of the exhibition is a cycle of mural-size paintings; their “canvas” is pleated tulle, a netting-like fabric. Entitled “Veiled Threats” (1999–2010), this series — never before seen in its entirety in the U.S. — was inspired by the words of the late Kashmiri-American Muslim poet, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), with whom Patkin collaborated during the two years before Ali’s death. The paintings are hung from stage set-like flats, creating rooms that invite viewers to literally and metaphorically enter the pictorial space, suspending the distinction between material and illusion. With the ghostly imagery of these “veils,” Patkin has visually adapted Ali’s poems — some of which are English

reinterpretations of well-known works in Urdu and Arabic — which touch on themes of memory, loss, love, and exile. Seen together, all the works in The Wandering Veil are informed by Patkin’s own history, along with significant social and geopolitical events, including the AIDS crisis, the Middle East conflict, and the flattening effects of globalization. While the exhibition title references “the wandering Jew,” Patkin asserts that the diaspora experience is universal and takes many forms. Having lived between different cultures, Patkin has come to believe that religious doctrines have dictated the evolution of pictorial space: representation (the invention of the icon), abstraction (the prohibition against the graven image), and manifestation (the practice of idol worship, where image and object —  i.e. the god —  are one and the same). These visual codes in turn shape how we perceive reality and ourselves. Patkin’s paintings and sculptures probe the potential and the failings of all these languages without hierarchy.

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Organized thematically, the exhibition can be understood as a procession of narratives told by related groupings of works. The first of these are stories about the boundaries of perception. With various references to the mirror, this set culminates with The Maids of Honor (1988). One of Patkin’s groundbreaking paintings on pleated neoprene, it is based on Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) — a masterpiece known for implicating the viewer within the pictorial space. Painting only the outer surface of the curtain, the artist implies a material “deep space” in the dark, unpainted voids of the folds. (It begs for the probing fingers of a doubting Thomas.) With Alice at its center, the painting intimates at a world on the other side of the curtain. Having conveyed the instability of images to his viewer, Patkin quickly plunges us into a story of calamity and more instability, violence, and death in several “veil” paintings. You Tell Us What to Do (2010) pictures Arab and Jewish refugees on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa seashore, while Arik Patkin WTC (2006) depicts a snapshot of the artist’s father taken shortly before his death and the Twin Towers’ demise. The Veil

Suite (2007) visualizes the last poem Ali wrote. Images of a man under a veil, shadows of a photographer with a veiled camera, a ballerina, and Christ mingle in a dreamlike tableaux. A condemnation of love for a god who has abandoned us, The Veil Suite—Patkin’s requiem for Ali—leads us into imagery of time, devotion, and loss. The painting Madonna and Child (1998) depicts a woman holding a blank canvas, while Time Clipping the Wings of Love

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(2005–11) is a timepiece with a hole where the clock would be. In Evening (2008) a magician arrests time in Venice. The Dead are Here (2009) tells the unrequited love story of Laila and Majnoon, the Romeo and Juliet of the East. Patkin paints Laila in a cemetery (instead of the traditional garden) sitting under Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s famous l’Amour menaçant (1757). This menacing cupid with a secret is repeated in Patkin’s Sèvres-porcelain sculpture of the Virgin. The garden theme in the next grouping also evokes exile, time, and change. A monumental sculpture in Venetian glass

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is a manifestation of Shiva Nataraja, here leaping out of a sundial, which is also a ring of roses. A painting of a utopian landscape gone dark, Et in Arcadia Ego (2012) leads to the rug-like Gardens for the Global City (1990–) in the far gallery. The series’ meditations on the compositions of traditional Asian carpets evoke recognizable styles of the New York School and European Modernist painters. On the balcony above, Palagonia (1990) is named for a Sicilian Baroque villa decorated with the grotesque statues that a cuckolded prince commissioned of his wife’s lovers. The sculpture conflates gnarled figures with Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa to form a strange band of music-makers. For Patkin it is an homage to the spark of inspiration, which we see can be driven by both devotion and betrayal. Facing the white sculpture are life-size photographs of its own characters portrayed on a background of white lace. Perforated like veils, and with the inclusion of one anomaly portrait, these white-on-white images ruminate on more uncertainty.

An early work in the corner of the balcony brings the journey full circle. Gloomy Gallery (My Promise Can’t Be Broken) (1981) is a curtain-like painting framed under plexiglass. Magnets physically open the image” through the glass, revealing the wall and the stretcher (which resembles a cross) behind. The unattainable promise of representation surfaces again and again throughout Patkin’s practice: the promise of salvation, the promise of love, the promise of the Modernist utopia, and, ultimately, the promise of the image. Patkin offers multiple viewpoints in all his works. With a transparency both real and metaphorical, he continuously brings us “behind the scenes” — as he does here so dramatically with the naked stage flats supporting his “veils.” An uber-consciousness functions across the exhibition as a whole, always inviting us to look at ourselves looking in, looking down, looking through, as the images reveal the stories of their making —  as well as our own.St

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1040 MASS MoCA WayNorth Adams, MA 01247413.MoCA.111massmoca.org

Izhar Patkin was born in Israel in 1955 and has lived and worked in the United States since 1977. In 1981 he had his first solo exhibition at The Kitchen in New York City, followed in 1983 by his first exhibition with his long-time gallerist, Holly Solomon. Since gaining notoriety in the mid-1980s for groundbreaking works such as The Black Paintings (1985–86), he has exhibited around the world at distinguished venues including the Whitney Biennial, New York; The Venice Biennale; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the Jewish Museum, New York; and others. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others.

cover: Don Quijote Segunda Parte, 1987 (detail)Anodized cast aluminum. 92" x 75" x 40"

interior flap: The Veil Suite, 2007 (detail)Ink on tulle (painting for four walls). 14' x 22' x 25'

Izhar Patkin: The Wandering VeilDecember 7, 2013–September 1, 2014

This exhibition is supported by Lynn Holstein and Artis with additional funding provided by Rivka Saker, the Consulate General of Israel to New England, the Agha Shahid Ali Literary Trust, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.