Chana Orloff: Feminist Sculpture in Israel

The Mané-Katz Museum in Haifa is proud to present a selection from the works of artist Chana Orloff (1888-1968), an early proponent of a personal, revolutionary approach to the female body, alongside works of contemporary art that seek to explore conventional boundaries in depictions of the female body with regard to collective space.

Orloff was among the first artists to place the female body at the focus of her work and depict it using a modernist idiom. While still a young woman in Ukraine, she rejected the traditional female role. Upon arriving in Paris, she met the most prominent artists of the period and painted portraits of women who represented, in her eyes, the ideal of the modern, independent woman. Orloff created dozens of female nude sculptures and sculpted portraits of Biblical heroines, pioneers and dancers, pregnant women and mothers, as well as works that emphasize the ideal of friendship between women. During the 1950s and 1960s, when she gained international renown, she divided her time between Paris and Israel. Here as well, she created portraits of women from the spheres of culture and art.

The feminist attitude towards the female body has grown increasingly radical with the passage of time. As part of this development, the exhibition explores the historical relationship of the female body with the conventional gendered division of public and private spaces. This exploration includes works by contemporary female Israeli sculptors, who employ post-modern tactics such as shock, provocation, and irony in order to examine contemporary aspects related to the female body. Their works subvert culturally determined divisions and boundaries, granting legitimacy to the "unusual" and "irrational," in defiance of years of discrimination. The result is a collection of rich and complex artistic practices, which examine the physical, political, and psychological place of femininity. Participating artists include: Noa Arad-Yairi, Sharon Balaban, Ronit Baranga, Meira Grossinger, Meirav Heiman, Amira Zayan, Tova Lotan, Dalia Meiri, Orly Montag, Esther Naor, Tali Navon, Vered Sivan, Vera Korman, Hava Raucher, Ira Reichwerger.

The exhibition includes the installation In-Between by artist Tali Navon (b. 1964), inspired by Orloff's sculptures of mothers, whose softness reflects a universal idea of motherhood. From the 1960s and 1970s, art works influenced by radical feminism rejected the traditional representations of maternal femininity. Beginning in the 1990s, the post-modern discourse returned to a discussion of the experience of motherhood, emphasizing the woman's freedom to choose and to control her own body. Navon's installation, reflecting this renewed trend, comprises a video piece and a sculptural object, offering a multifaceted representation of womanhood.

With reference to the preoccupation with the female body, the museum also presents a selection from the works of Mané-Katz that address the female nude body, as an important aspect of his oeuvre. In the artist's early paintings and drawings we can see the influence of Cubism, which dismantled the anatomic structure of the female body and reassembled it using geometric shapes. Later, Mané-Katz developed an earthly, sensual image of the temptress as the object of male passion, inspired by the Orientalist trend in nineteenth-century art. The exhibition reveals the changing, varied approach to the female nude in his work.

Curator: Svetlana Reingold