Tal Sterngast

Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie is known for its outstanding collection of European paintings from the thirteenth to eighteenth century. Each chapter in this book is dedicated to one painting from the collection. In the breadth of this idiosyncratic selection, painting, as it discovers itself becomes a medium for the formulation of modern subjectivity. Each painting in focus unfolds its own making and its artistic concerns as they reflect contemporary issues, today. What are the paradoxes within which art is made by women? How does the primordial drive to destroy works of art affect today's art discourse? Where did the modern struggle of painting against the picture begin? Why does the Wild Man from early German Renaissance still haunt us? And why doesn’t it matter whether Jan Vermeer used an optical device for his paintings? Twelve Paintings highlights the currentness of the Old Masters.

The Dead Sea tells its own stories. Its salt crystals are like prisms. Through them you can see the world anew. Israeli artist Sigalit Landau creates this vision by using the world’s saltiest sea as her laboratory. Everyday objects are “baptized” by immersing them in the Dead Sea for months. Completely covered in salt, they have a hypnotizing effect. The transience of objects is transposed into the poetic aura of crystalline permanence. In this form, issues of female identity and bodily experience, the shadows of the Holocaust, the tense political situation in Israel, as well as questions of justice, structural violence, and economic exploitation of nature are negotiated. Salt Years is both a catalogue of these works created at the Dead Sea and a visually stunning documentation of the artist’s process. Exhibition: Museum der Moderne Salzburg, July 6 – November 17, 2019