Etty Lev’s exhibition of paintings ‘Unexpected Encounters’ records her early memories and acts as a sort of family album.
By CARL HOFFMAN‘At a Crossroads,’ 2012 521(photo credit: Courtesy Etty Lev)
You can’t get much more Israeli than artist Etty Lev. Not only is she a Sabra – born, raised in and rooted to the Land of Israel – she is also a member of one of the few Jewish families that never left the land.Lev is the granddaughter of artist Abraham Zerahya. The Zerahya family was part of a small Jewish farming community that lived in the village of Hatzbaya (now in Lebanon) at the foot of Mount Hermon for more than 2,000 years. They lived there peacefully from the time of the Second Temple and remained there after the Roman conquest, through the Byzantine period, the Arab conquest, the Crusades and the coming of the Ottoman Turks. They lived, farmed and maintained friendly relations with their Druse neighbors, who eventually became predominant in their village.The political turmoil in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century, along with ethnic clashes and blood libels against Jews, forced the Jews of the Hermon to move southward into what is now the State of Israel. Many families, including the Zerahyas, transplanted themselves to Rosh Pina, attracted by the establishment of a silk factory livelihood project sponsored by Baron Rothschild.Lev’s grandfather, Abraham, moved to Jerusalem in 1920, invited by Boris Schatz to teach copper fluting and jewelry making at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Zerahya had acquired these skills earlier in Damascus. He opened a studio in Paris 10 years later and divided his time between Paris and Jerusalem until his death in 1941, the year his granddaughter, Etty Lev, was born.“I didn’t know my grandfather,” she says. “But always, in the homes of my mother and grandmother, were all his works and his diplomas. All the time, the art of my grandfather was putting something in my head.” Lev has often referred to this “something” as “color molecules,” planted in her mind as she looked at her grandfather’s copper works during her childhood.And as for that childhood, Lev says, “It was very nice, visiting my grandmother in her big house in Jerusalem, with the big old windows and the colorful old floors. And seeing all my aunts and uncles. Almost all of my family is gone now. But they came to visit me, bringing back many, many memories.”While departed relatives have a way of “visiting” many of us after a certain age, Lev’s family members came to visit while she was painting. An established abstract painter with decades of work and exhibitions behind her, Lev began to encounter figures in the midst of her abstract forms, figures she was able to identify as relatives and herself as a small child. The result of these visions is a current exhibition, “Unexpected Encounters,” a series of paintings, all done during the past two years, that both record her memories and act as a sort of family album.“Her paintings are constructed as a familiar environment, with color stains and crossing lines that create an artistic space, rich with geometrical shapes and shining colorful images. This background provides an open space, inviting guests to unexpected, imaginative and surprising encounters; encounters with the past and encounters with faces and shadows,” writes exhibition curator Rachel Sukman.Some of the figures in Lev’s paintings appear almost as portraits, while others are indeed shadow people, perhaps more dimly remembered.In Unexpected Encounters, the title piece of the exhibition, we see a vivid visual document of events that Lev seems to remember as if they happened yesterday. Like James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which chronicles a single June day in Dublin, Lev’s painting recalls one day in Jerusalem, long ago. It begins with her mother telling her, “Come quick, we have to meet Uncle Nathan on Ben-Yehuda Street!”What follows, all strikingly arrayed in oil on canvas, is the loving recollection of an emotionally charged bus ride, passing the colorful vegetable stalls and riotously colored goods in the windows of shops along the way, looking through the bus window and recognizing the house of an aunt, and riding with her mother through the streets of a Jerusalem that exists now only in her memories. We see Lev and her mother Abigail at the center, sharing a seat on the bus, while Uncle Nathan is represented as a portrait in a red frame, at a distance from the two, in the upper right-hand corner.The urban cityscape of Lev’s childhood Jerusalem figures heavily in many of the paintings in this exhibition, with vibrant depictions of houses, windows, fences and utility poles, along with market stalls bursting with the colors of flowers and fruits. And throughout the paintings are the faces and shadows. The faces, seen in paintings like Family Meeting, are those of her family and herself. But one wonders who the shadows are in other works like Encounter with Shadows – perhaps people remembered only faintly, or people who are actually imaginary.Ask her who her influences were and Lev will not mention abstract artists like Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee. Instead, she will mention only Israeli artists, like her teacher Eliahu Gat, and others like Shimon Avni and Eliora Steimatzky. “She’s very local,” says curator Rachel Sukman. “She’s very, very local and fundamental. She is rooted here with the earth, with the air, with the people and with the traditions, the food and her family. She is not international.”Lev began to paint seriously as a teenager and studied at the Ramat Gan College of Painting and Sculpture. She was exposed to conceptual art in the avant-garde-illuminated 1960s and mounted her first exhibition at the Tel Aviv Artist’s House a few years later. She developed her own abstract language during the late 1970s and her works appeared often at the Artist’s House. In 1984, Lev became chair of the Tel Aviv Association of Painters and Sculptors, the first woman elected to that position. She has had 12 solo exhibitions and has participated in 22 group exhibitions.We cannot know what set off the avalanche of memories that generated the paintings in this exhibition. Lev claims not to know either. One thing appears to be more or less certain, however: whatever it was has passed. “I am finished painting my family,” Lev says. Asked what is next, she puts a finger to her head and replies, “I have some ideas.” “Unexpected Encounters” is on display until August 3 at The Office in Tel Aviv Gallery, 6 Zamenhof Street, Tel Aviv. Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday to Thursday 5 to 7 p.m. For information, call (03) 525-4191 or visit www.officeintelavivgallery.com
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