The Rovers
The Rovers is an in-print exhibition on paper which focuses on seven artists who left Israel at a rather early age, before or on the verge of establishing their creative output, and became significant contributors to the Western art scene. The exhibition features Yaacov Agam (b. 1928), Haim Steinbach (b. 1944), Serge Spitzer (1951-2012), Michael Klegg and Martin Guttmann (b. 1957), Absalon (1964-1993), and Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976).
The Rovers originates from the necessity to form an alternative framing to the canonical-Zionist narrative of Israeli art, a framing in which Israeliness is not an expression of a place but a given present time, and Israel is not an actual territory – either stable or precarious – but a vague image of a passageway; a space that was abandoned and left behind. It is a chronological historical exhibition utilizing a heterogenous perspective, i.e., an exhibition based on a curatorial principle allowing to gather artists of different generations and contexts, while remaining attentive to the creative biography and individuality of each of them.
For some of the artists presented here, the element of leaving is integral to their work. For others it is an external element, whose transformation into integral in the exhibit reveals the way the act of curation forces itself from the outside into the work. In that sense, The Rovers uses the leaving of Israel to illustrate the consequences of curation, to show it as both an arbitrary and essential structure, and thereby to confirm the irreducible uniqueness of the work of art as well as the disintegration potential in every group exhibit and every group of artists.
More than a theme, The Rovers provides a sort of framework – loose yet explicit – which articulates and amplifies aspects of indeterminacy, unfixity, evasion, and withdrawal in the work of its artists, referring to them as a real and metaphorical reflection of their separation from Israel.