Avi Sabah: Tends to be Forgotten
Recipient of the Rappaport Prize for a Promising Israeli Artist, 2022
The exhibition Tends to be Forgotten focuses on four series of paintings, which crystallized in the last three years—a period rife with crises and disasters, during which artist Avi Sabah relocated to Portugal. Verging on the Atlantic Ocean, the new climatic space yields to the effects of the sea. In the summer, huge fires burn in the mountains, and in the winter, water condenses close to the surface and bubbles amid the rocks. The moist air cools quickly, and thick fog envelops the studio windows. These atmospheric temperaments have infiltrated the work processes and their subjects, significantly transforming them. Sabah's current work bears distinct scenic features, and the bold materiality has been replaced with the rules of the watery, diluted world.
Avi Sabah's (b. 1977, Ma'alot Tarshiha, Israel) work has evolved, from the very outset, through a search for correspondence between physical substances and emotional dispositions, such as between fog as an atmospheric phenomenon and fog as a state of consciousness. His early works pushed the boundaries of matter in the most concrete sense, employing "non-standard" materials, such as cooking oil or tar, and acts such as burning works or burying them in the ground. These practices were formulated in the terms of alchemy, which is concerned with transmutation and animation of matter. Sabah works in series. In his studio routine, large bodies of work that share common material and visual themes gradually come together. The featured series—The Great Smoker, Second Wind, Tends to be Forgotten, Lately—share a constant format, the same type of paper, and unique imagery.
Sabah "collects water": he places glass and metal panels outside the studio; at night, the fog gathers into drops, and in the morning the panels are brought into the studio, to be painted on with watercolors. The mist water dissolves the medium (honey or gum arabic) that holds the pigment, and then evaporates. The paintings are an amalgamation of the images of the mountain, the battlefield, or moments of divine revelation; they are the landscapes of both Portugal and Ma'alot Tarshiha, both nightmares and reality.
Avi Sabah, From the series The Great Smoker, 2020-24
Watercolor on archival paper
The exhibition and catalogue were made possible through the generosity of the Bruce and Ruth Rappaport Foundation
Additional support to the catalogue has been provided by David Bartholdy, Haifa
