‘Taking in the View’: Ticho House reframes Jerusalem through contemporary art

Mother Nature and Jerusalem are central to the exhibition Taking in the View, which opened at Ticho House on May 1.

No surprises there, considering Anna Ticho’s bucolic-themed collection, which predominantly feeds off the undulating landscapes and flora around the capital.

For this presentational venture, exhibition curator Gilad Reich and Ticho House senior curator Timna Seligman have gone for left-field domains in addressing Ticho’s prized and ever-popular body of work, and how she perceived her natural surroundings.

“Taking in the View features creations by five contemporary artists – all recent additions to the Israel Museum artwork inventory – that interrelate with the host painter and expound on her core aesthetics and ethos. They also take the base sentiments far beyond Ticho’s creative purview, bringing it into the realms of 21st-century perception and dynamics.

The exhibition might also serve to pave the way to Ticho’s oeuvre for younger generations of arts consumers who may very well consider her watercolors a little too far to the romanticized parochial side for their liking.

Rerich allowed himself plenty of room for curatorial maneuver, unfurling a multifarious sounding board of diverse photographic voices and artistic and cultural perspectives around the permanent offerings.

Realism sits alongside abstract-leaning efforts, such as an intriguing print by Beersheba-born Paris-based Raphael Y. Herman called Perspeciuum. That and Ora Lev’s The Way It Was series, in fact, cross the red line into the disciplinary unknown, intentionally and purposefully eschewing fundamental principles of the photographic rulebook.

For his 2022 exhibition at the munificently appointed 18th-century Baroque-style Palazzo Sant’elia, in Palermo, Italy, Herman chose to hold the official opening at night, thereby seamlessly transporting the viewers to similar conditions to those in which the works were captured.

Ticho House, on the other hand, is an old Jerusalem edifice with high ceilings that admit an abundance of natural light during the day, amplified by the typically whitewashed walls.

That has two principal effects.

First, it resonates something similar to Herman’s favored creative setting.

Second, the insubstantial radiance forces one to make an effort to discern the detail of the outsized print which, at first glance, appears to be a uniformly dull amorphous stretch that offers little in the way of interest or surprise.

But as your eyes recalibrate to the miserly lighting level, you begin to decipher some finer details, such as reddish spots that crop up here, there, and everywhere across the paper, amid the random dispersal of the somewhat grainy components of the seemingly vague scene.

There’s nothing like just letting a work of art do the business for you. All you have to do is just not get in the way of the naturally evolving creative process.

“Raphael goes to sleep in a sleeping bag there. What he gets in the morning is actually the result of light pollution in the air which is captured by the camera during the course of the night.”

The pictorial upshot takes some absorbing, but as you gradually allow the visual white noise to dissipate, you begin to pick out the spectral red dots and other forms, as it were, emerging from the eddying mists. “You start to see more things. I didn’t, at first, notice the trees,” says Reich. “It is a very special technique.”

It is, indeed, a work worth waiting on. But, at the end of the day, Taking in the View is fueled by the way Anna Ticho perceived the lay of the topographical and natural land around her, and how she conveyed that through her artistic prism.

But, I pressed Reich, how does Perspeciuum fit in with all of that?

Reich feels it boils down to reimagining and refashioning. “This is about deconstruction. It is a different way of looking at the view, of looking at a familiar view which becomes unfamiliar. If we were to look at this in Herman’s work, and any of the new works here, it is a matter of going through a process of practice. You need to do that in order to try to decipher what is in front of you.”

That also serves to draw the museum or gallery visitors into the thick of the creative action, and gets them to spend time with the exhibit in question. That has to be good for both the artist and the culture consumer who has come along to get some kind of handle on the display offering, and the undercurrents to the artists’ way of doing their thing.

The most surprising element of the layered exhibition is the spread of diminutive snapshots taken by Ticho herself. Okay, so Ticho, who died in 1980 and the age of 85, took them – in the 1970s – as part of the preparatory lead-up to taking up her palette, mixing the base hues, and placing paintbrush on canvas. Even so, who knew that the celebrated painter even owned a camera, let alone took it with her as she roamed the terrain around the capital in search of a suitable location and/or aesthetically pleasing item of flora to portray in her own inimitable, romantically leaning style?

“There are places she went back to again and again, and snapped them several times,” Reich advises, adding that he also wasn’t aware of Ticho’s photographic exploits until recently. “It is a wonderful discovery.

“What is really interesting is the great contradiction between her photographs and her paintings. She looks at her snaps and, ultimately, she takes something completely different from them into her painting,” says Reich in a reprise of the deconstruction thread he says runs through the exhibition.

“Her painting, you could say, has a romantic style, but her photographs are almost like conceptual art of the 1970s,” the curator tells me as we gaze at a dozen somewhat faded, sepia-tinged, polychromic photos. He then takes me around to the obverse side of the framed set, which features just two black-and-white prints. They proffer a sharp change of observational approach. “This is entirely different,” he states. “It’s monochrome. You would have never thought this was something Anna Ticho photographed.”

Extra-contextual fare abounds across the whole show. Noa Ben-Nun Melamed is another exhibitor who went the left-field way in addressing Ticho’s oeuvre.

“All the new acquisitions look at the view but suggest a new way of looking at it, of portraying it or seeing it,” says Reich. “The landscape is local, but they give it a twist.”

Ben-Nun Melamed certainly ventures into patently non-Ticho territory, both in her technological modus operandi and, by definition, in terms of the visual end result.

“With Noa it is difficult to discern that there is a local landscape in there,” the curator posits. “She photographs a scene, and then introduces digital intervention. You no longer know what landscape it is, or where it is.”

It may not even be from the environs of Jerusalem, thereby taking the Ticho line and running with it into aesthetic and philosophical quarters Anna Ticho could probably not even imagine, let alone incorporate in her own work.

The contextual waters are further muddied by the fact that Ben-Nun Melamed’s contributions originate from various series dating between 2011 and 2020.

The artist traverses broad conceptual ground, taking herself and her viewer along fantastical channels that raise questions about real and imaginary views. If one of the base attributes of art is to pose questions about “reality” as we perceive it, and get us to ponder what we see around us, Ben-Nun Melamed’s technologically refashioned works achieve that with room to spare.

The same could be said of Ora Lev’s slot in the exhibition, taken from her The Way It Was series, which dates to 2017-2018. However, Lev addresses the Taking in the View deconstruction conceptual leitmotif from the opposite end of the technological timeline, opting for an old-school means for producing her images.

Her works look like she took a bunch of flowers and put them through a full-color X-ray machine. But, in fact, she employed a far simpler, hands-on technique to achieve the captivating effect. She went for a photogram camera-less process, using glass plates and light-sensitive backdrops that produce a silhouette of the object in question, in this case flowers and other vegetation. The long exposure element integral to the time-honored technique brings out the details of the object, almost to the point of hyperrealism.

“I learned this from an exercise our teacher gave us to do when I was in my first year of [college] studies,” Lev recalls. “It is a sort of blueprint effect.”

It also inverts the actual colors of the – in this case – flower so that the viewer ends up with a distilled flipside rendition of the subject. That resonates with the basic component of the artistic process, the relationship between corporeal reality and its presentation in the chosen artistic verbiage.

“You get an image similar to what you see when you look at something through a microscope,” Lev notes. “It is a kind of research method.”

Again, that suits the analytical deconstructive ethos of the exhibition.

And, as there is a throwback spirit to the whole Ticho-fueled project, the nostalgia berth occupied by Dorian Gottlieb seems to be a welcome given. Anyone who took the old train route to Jerusalem, which sped its way across the plains between Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh before the train began to huff and puff as it wended its meandering way through the Jerusalem Hills, should revel in Romanian-born Gottlieb’s If You Loved Me and If video work from 2018.

The camera offers a tantalizing view through a train car window as the seasonally verdant landscape flickers across the plate glass. There is also a tangential dimension to the filmic rollout as objects, such as trees, bushes, the odd abandoned stone structure, wall, or pathway, ebb and flow as per their proximity to the train tracks.

This is not just a trip down memory lane, albeit a moving one for many of us, particularly those who remember a previous version of the transport mode with hard, uncomfortable wooden benches and, in pre-air-conditioning days, windows wide open to the elements, through which you surreptitiously stretch out a hand and touch tree branches at the junctures where the train slowed down to make it round a particularly sharp turn.

“These are the landscapes Anna Ticho saw herself,” Gottlieb pertinently notes, who brings another Ticho-related element into sharp focus. “The landscape moves towards us and away from us. I can’t control that – a bit like the watercolors Anna Ticho used.”

The new acquisitions also include a diptych by Ella Littwitz titled Edith who, in some sources, is identified with Lot’s wife. The biblical character who, we are told, was turned into a pillar of salt when she defied the divine prohibition and looked back at the destruction of Sodom near the Dead Sea, is portrayed as identical twins, based on 3D scans of the rock outcrop. That suggests a reflective view of life, while also keeping at least one eye firmly trained on the way ahead.

One presumes Anna Ticho would have gone along with that well-balanced approach to life and art.