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December 28th, 2022 – January 27th, 2023, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem
Double exhibition: paintings by Sara Benninga, sculpture by Rachel Rotenberg
Curator: Avital Wexler
Sara Benninga and Rachel Rotenberg are distant in terms of technique, materials, artistic influences and personal backgrounds. Yet they are close in their twisting line, which crops and curves somewhere between discomfort and beauty, between processed and plant. They bring closer the presence and absence, body and place, transforming them into a space which contains the wild and raw alongside aesthetic restraint and order. Through bold, direct lines, both observe in form and material, hinting at or explicitly referencing the female body. At times, it seems they are pondering the assumption that everything round must necessarily be soft and malleable. Their manner of observation and expression allows a powerful, primeval, and sometimes aggressive, force to emerge from the curves, and be realized in the exhibition space.
Sara Benninga’s paintings are replete with motion and expressiveness, shifting in a storm between pronounced contour lines, at times sharp and fragmented, at times soft and liberated; between clear, linear and schematic figures; and between black, compressed figures. She leaves the linen canvas exposed beside a burning splotch of color.
Benninga, who is also an art researcher and former dancer, paints scenes, bordering on the fantastical, of nudes in nature. While she leans on longstanding art traditions, she does so with contemporary directness, at times crude. Each scene contains a familiar, easily identifiable experience, which despite this is enigmatic and even threatening.
The influence of Matisse’s backgrounds and compositions, as well as Gaugin’s molding of figures, is apparent in her paintings. One might say she creates a contemporary version of Expressionism, located on the spectrum between utopian and esoteric. Manet’s renowned painting “The Luncheon on the Grass” (1863) depicts two nude women beside two clothed men in a picnic in a meadow. The woman closest to the foreground directs her gaze at the viewer. Benninga strives to examine what happens in the pleasure garden, in its version as an exclusively female space. She reenacts the situation, expels the men, and directs the women’s gaze inwards, into the space they are in. She thereby liberates the women, perhaps even herself as an artist, from the male presence, from the accepted model of beauty, from excesses of knowledge and from the need to please the viewer
proximity between them, sitting naked on that very same picnic blanket among the bushes, also generate that female sisterhood that is so talked about today? Or perhaps, just one moment after the pastoral sojourn and voluntary uprooting, which, by the way, is not necessarily passive, emotions, urges and fears start to come to the surface, and the intimacy could turn into a battle.
Looking closely, the figures appear to be in upheaval. And what starts out in the paintings Three Women, Three Women and Floral Design, and Four as a space for iconographic recovery, a kind of artistic women’s retreat to heal from the male gaze and establish a non-judgmental female tribe where everything is allowed, turns, in the paintings Attraction, Three Grazias and Behind the Bush into a Bacchanalian arena for experimentation, playful, chaotic, sexual, confusing, seductive and perhaps even dangerous
The pastoral promise of a pleasure garden where beautiful women sit in harmony is indeed truncated together with the body parts, yet the artist’s skilled hand transforms it into a rapid dance, continuing from one painting to the next, from eros to taboo, straddling the line between pleasure and suffering.
The new stage in the series begins to emerge in the painting In the Forest (Blue Black) where the scene appears to break free into abstraction. Bodily fragments and marks which previously delineated “bushes”, “nature” or “body” are transformed into a new web, dark and fascinating, of shapes, textures and materials that beam from the canvas into the gallery space.
Rachel Rotenberg’s impressive wood sculptures maintain a closeness to nature and to the original tone of the red cedar wood from which they are made. The artist, who immigrated to Israel from Baltimore about six years ago, brought the cedar panels to Israel from Canada, the country where she was born. In some of the sculptures she adds to the dialogue between line and form colorful interventions that emphasize, like outlines, the sculpture’s movement in space. In others, she integrates metal and concrete elements with the wood, drawing the viewer’s attention to the distinction between warm and cold hues.
Whether the sculptures stand on the floor or hang from the wall, they have varying relationships with the exhibition space, the viewer and amongst themselves. Some envelop and gape open a void that seems organic and human, a place a body could inhabit. Others have an opening that serves as a peeping window. Yet others illustrate a winding, blossoming space, of which the artist seems to have revealed just a tiny part.
The sculptures, made of a wood that is still somewhat raw, embrace the exhibition space in a weighty bear hug or a loving, accepting hug, inviting the viewer to circle them, approach them and examine them from all directions. It would appear that, beyond the genuine, compressed materiality of the wood and metal, time or duration also serve as sculpting materials, and the viewer is compelled to move around the works. And at times, as in the work Interior Space, the viewer is even compelled to peek inside, witnessing how they change and reveal themselves before their very eyes. This process causes the viewer to give themselves up to the sculptures entirely, in a kind of covenant between the artwork, the space it gathers within itself, and the presence of the viewers as live beings, who sense and feel movement through time. This thereby adds a layer of motion and decryption around the sculpture.
Some of the sculptures, such as Shelter, Untitled and Secrets, look like close-ups of small plant pods or branches in a forest. Others look like body parts: eye, stomach, genital or uterus, as in Warrior #2 and Ways to See. Yet others are a preliminary realization of abstract movement, such as Layers on Layers. The unique combination between these delicate and vulnerable contexts and the mass and monumentality that the sculptures elicit, together generate an ecosystem that is complete, complex, and natural, while simultaneously being light and heavy, full and empty, soft and hard, closed and open, concrete and abstract.
Installation of the works close to Beninga’s paintings mitigates the sculptures’ abstract tendency and intensifies and provides a strong footing for the corporeal intuition and human experience encapsulated in them. The sculptures’ proximity to the paintings accords the paintings a sense of actually being outdoors, not just simulating an “outdoors” within the boundaries of the painting. The figures thereby appear as if they are moving and resting freely within some kind of sculpture garden. Yet this is not a sweet, pastoral garden, rather one that also contains wildness and violence. Thus, this joint exhibition is not just pretty and silent. And as Friedrich Nietzsche claimed in “The Birth of Tragedy”, the battle and integration between Apollo and Dionysus, who happened to be two male deities, is what gave birth to the tragedy as a form of high art which includes time, emotion and form. In this exhibition, the wide spectrum that coexists, seeps into the heart and body and brings to mind that the ability to contain opposites, and to simultaneously experience conflicting emotions, is also connected to a female lifecycle that is tragic or replete with vitality, in which the body fills and empties, celebrates and bleeds, receives and influences, and then repeats itself all over again.
