Hagit Sterenshuss: Past, Tense
The exhibition Past Tense presents a selection of portraits by Hagit Sterenshuss, the bulk of whose work was created in the 1980s and early 1990s. As the only daughter of sculptor, illustrator, and designer Ruth Zarfati and sculptor and painter Moshe Sternschuss, two prominent artists in 1950s Israel, her artistic language carries overtones of her childhood home alongside the desire to find an independent voice. The large-scale figurative portraits, which have become her hallmark, were mostly painted during her sojourn in London and New York, sensitively addressing moments of loneliness in the big city.
In international art (followed by local art), the 1980s were marked by a "return to painting." Artistic practice, immediately after the peaks of minimalist and conceptual art, was characterized by a search for new forms of figurative painting and a return to the body and to human interaction. A look back at those years reveals a turbulent decade that ushered in the age of media. Elements of high and low culture began to blend, undermining the hierarchies of Western modernism.
As its title suggests, the exhibition Past Tense takes us on a time travel back to another time and place, prior to the works' date of making. The figures, whose portraits are rendered in vivid pastel colors, belong to the artist's immediate circle of friends. Their "natural" place is the domestic setting, but the internal drama raging in their souls and discernible on their faces seems to draw the external reality inward, a reality which reeks of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Alongside vitality and passion, it is also imbued with desistance and death, against the backdrop of the outbreak of AIDS.
Sterenshuss's work reveals an artistic channel which was far from central in the historiography of Israeli art. It indicates a turning away from national narratives and the definition of the local versus the universal, and a preference for vulnerable existence, crumbling like pastel chalk. In 1994, Sterenshuss turned to Hinduism. She continues to create and teach art, but has refrained from exhibiting her work until now.
Fortis and Malka, 1985
Pastel on paper