The art world’s rite of spring

This year’s Fresh Paint fair offers some old favorites and some new innovations.

By CARL HOFFMAN
paiting 370 (photo credit: stock)
paiting 370
(photo credit: stock)
Spring arrived a bit late this year, but the Israeli art world’s annual spring revels are ready to begin, right on time. The Fresh Paint Contemporary Art Fair will once again light up the night in south Tel Aviv from May 21 to 25, drawing tens of thousands of people from all over Israel to festive evenings of art, video, lectures and personal encounters with artists, as well as a colorful array of special projects and activities intended to bring people and art closer together. As if all that were not enough, this year’s five-night soiree will also see the debut of Fresh Design, a design fair that will run alongside Fresh Paint.
Now in its sixth year, Fresh Paint has become Israel’s largest and most important art fair, logging in an annual total of more than 30,000 visitors. Aside from the expected turnout of artists, art lovers, art critics, art curators, gallery owners and art collectors, many of these visitors have been people with m i n i m a l prior exposure to art, turned into committed art enthusiasts by just one evening at Fresh Paint.
Fresh Paint provides a venue for many of the leading art galleries in Israel to promote their featured artists and showcase their works, as well as a high-profile platform for unknown new artists to display their work and launch their careers. The fair itself was launched in 2008 by Sharon Tillinger and Yifat Gurion, both non-artists but obsessively serious art lovers. Their goals were to make art more accessible to the general public and to create a platform for artists to sell their work and make a living from their art.
Now, six years on, how do they rate their success? “I don’t like to brag, but it’s been a very big success,” says Gurion. “Our idea was not so much to take art out of the halls and into the streets, but to make people take art into their homes. And to make people understand that art is not only something to be seen in art galleries, but that it should also be a part of their lives. We been successful in showing people that they don’t have to be very well off in order to buy art, that they can bring art into their homes. We have shown them that art is not something that you just look at in a gallery and not bring into your life.
“AND AS far as helping artists make a living, we have also been very successful. Of course, it’s not as though all artists sell equally and make the same amount of money.
But we have many artists who sell work and tell us that they can now afford to buy a computer, rent a studio and work on their art more because of their sales at Fresh Paint. Many artists have in fact made their first sale at the fair, and some artists have actually been able to empty their studios of unsold work and start all over again, making them not only very happy but also very creative.”
Bur fresh Paint is more than just a place for artists to sell and people to buy works of painting and sculpture.
The fair is a vast, glittering world of art. This year no fewer than 23 of Israel’s leading contemporary art galleries will participate. The galleries range widely in their styles of contemporary art, each gallery deciding which of its artists to present.
The beating heart of Fresh Paint, however, is the nowfamous Artists Greenhouse, a launch pad for promising new artists to display their work. The opportunity to exhibit this work alongside established contemporary art galleries enables these new artists – relatively unknown and not yet represented by galleries – to introduce themselves to gallery owners, art curators, art collectors and the general public. It also enables them to sell their work and begin to make a living from their time and talent.
Fifty-three independent artists were selected for the Greenhouse this year out of more than 1,000 applicants.
In addition to the exposure, contact with important people in the art world, and the opportunity to sell their works in a high-profile venue, the fortunate artists selected for the Greenhouse are also eligible for the Most Promising Artist Award, bestowed each year by the Igal Ahouvi Art Collection. The winning artist is chosen by an award committee whose composition changes every year. He or she is awarded a monetary prize of NIS 40,000 and a solo exhibition at the next Fresh Paint art fair. The winner is announced on the opening night of the fair.
The Most Promising Artist Award last year at Fresh Paint 5 was shared by two artists, Elham Rokni and Matan Mittwoch, who will each present a solo show this year at Fresh Paint 6.
Rokni, 33, was born in Iran and came to Israel when she was nine. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Israel and Europe, and has had one solo exhibition prior to Fresh Paint. As for her exhibition this year at the fair, she says, “It’s mostly drawings of mosques. And mosque paintings – paintings of mosques at night. There are also 25 drawings based on an old family picture of mine. They are all different images, based on the same picture. All together I am exhibiting about 60 works, divided into three different bodies of work.”
Mittwoch, 30, has participated in a few group exhibitions, and had had one solo exhibition that he says “was not very important,” and another solo exhibition at an art school in Haifa. His show this year at Fresh Paint is his first big event. “I am exhibiting three large-scale works that will make up one photography installation,” he says.
“It will be site-specific, geared to the fair. It points to the power sources of the capitalistic art world, and specifically the capitalistic art market. It will focus on the power sources in that market, and portray them as viruses attaching themselves to living cells. The living cells are the art fair, the viruses are the power sources in the art world.”
There are other awards as well, such as “Under the Hammer.” Each year, Sotheby’s Auction House awards a special prize for one work by an artist exhibiting at Fresh Paint. The winning work of art is chosen by a panel of Sotheby’s experts, and then offered at the annual auction of Israeli art at Sotheby’s in New York the following December. All expenses are paid by Sotheby’s and all proceeds from the sale go to the artist.
Additionally, each year Fresh Paint commissions a number of artworks from graduates of the Artists Greenhouse.
The fair guides the chosen artists through the initial curatorial stages to the works’ actual execution and first exposure at Fresh Paint.
Fresh Paint 6 will feature several programs and activities that have been popular in previous years. The Video Greenhouse, for example, presents video works by upand- coming independent artists. The Fresh Paint Salon offers an ongoing series of lectures, discussions and video screenings, as well as personal encounters with artists and other figures from the art world. This year’s featured artists will be AES+F, Russia’s prominent contemporary art group, which will return to Israel to present a wide-scope video work at Fresh Paint. Its Liminal Space Trilogy, consisting of Last Riot, The Feast of Trimalchio, and Allegoria Sacra, will be screened every evening at 7:30.
Also returning this year is the ever-popular Secret Postcard, which offers the chance to purchase a small original work of art by either a world-famous or totally unknown Israeli artist, for the uniform price of NIS 180.
Blank postcards are distributed to artists – 1,000 this year – who create a work of art on one side and sign their names on the other. Some of the artists are famous, others are as yet obscure. Are you getting an original work by Ron Arad, Haim Steinbach, Jake and Dinos Chapman, or something by a senior art student at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design? You don’t know until you buy.
All proceeds go to the Meyerhoff Art Education Center at the Tel Aviv Museum. The money funds art studies grants for gifted teens from underprivileged families.
THE MAJOR new development at Fresh Paint 6 will be the debut of an accompanying design fair, inevitably dubbed Fresh Design 1. This fair’s major feature will be a Design Greenhouse, featuring around 100 items from designers at early stages of their commercial careers, selected by the fair’s Greenhouse committee and consultants.
The selected items will represent a broad and diverse range of design types and styles – from functional to decorative, and then beyond to works that are more conceptual.
Gurion, chief curator for both fairs, expects Fresh Design 1 to boost the already high attendance of previous years. “We have had more than 30,000 visitors a year for the past four years. The design fair will add many more.”
Both fairs will be held at the same venue, which this year will be at the Tel Aviv Municipality’s new Logistics Center, in the city’s far south.
Which brings us to the final, endearingly quirky aspect of Fresh Paint, which might be expressed by the motto “another year, another venue.” Previous editions of the fair have been held in such imaginative locations as a renovated building on Kibbutz Galuyot Street, the restored Tahana complex in Neveh Tzedek, Warehouse 1 at Jaffa Port, an over three-hectare (about eight-acre) expanse of land near the Botanical Gardens, and a new and as-yetunopened high school in north Tel Aviv.
“It’s not easy to change locations every year,” says Gurion. “It keeps us on our toes, but that is what we like. It’s a good thing, but it’s very challenging. The fact that we change locations makes us very alert to what we are doing and how we are doing it. We have people saying to us each year, ‘This is the best place,’ or ‘I like the third-year place best, or the fourth-year place best.’ And we wonder where we are going to go next. I mean, we’re going to run out of places at some point.
“But we haven’t yet. So we keep trying to improve and trying to do new things. It keeps us from getting bored, that’s for sure.”Fresh Paint 6 and Fresh Design 1 will be held from May 21- 25 at the Tel Aviv Municipality’s new logistic center, 48 Tel Giborim Street, south Tel Aviv.
Opening Hours: Tuesday, May 21: 5 to 10 p.m.; Wednesday, May 22: 5 to 10 p.m.; Thursday, May 23: 5 to 10 p.m.; Friday, May 24: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday, May 25, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Last admission 30 minutes before closing.
For further information and updates: www.freshpaint.co.il