AVNER SHER | EMBRACING VANDALISM

AVNER SHER | EMBRACING VANDALISM

Avner Sher (born 1951, Israel), one of Israel’s most successful commercial architects, has earned his B. Arch, Architecture and Town Planning from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and graduated his Art studies at Haifa University.
During the early years of his career, sher’s style was mainly inspired by an urban and architectural aesthetic. An encounter with graffiti and vandalism on a public restroom wall sparked the birth of a new artistic form of creation.
Sher embraced the vandalistic act’s raw and violent nature and utilized it to create a new style. His work results from a very physically demanding process of injuring, scratching, etching, engraving, and scorching large cork and wood panels.

In 1999, Sher moved to Tel Aviv and had an experience that changed his life: He stopped at a gas station near Beit Yanai and saw that the restroom walls were covered with graffiti. Captivated by the wildness and artistic freedom they conveyed, he felt the urge to tear down barriers in his own work.
He began to paint and draw on cork panels mounted on wood, lacerating the surface with knives, screwdrivers, and electric saws, burning it with a wood-burning etching pencil and splattering it with substances like coffee, mud, ketchup, and red wine.
His work is also rooted in the iconography of the Levant.
He references ancient visual languages and hieroglyphics while maintaining a universal theme combining prehistoric elements and childlike symbolism. Common motifs in his work are fish, faces, spirals, and images of flora and fauna. Sometimes he incorporates Biblical verses, especially from the Book of Genesis and Psalms.
As the son of parents who survived Dachau, Sher grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and the numbers tattooed on their arms. The tattoo thus became a visual code in his work.

His first important show was in 2002 at Mabat Gallery in Tel Aviv 2002. Since then, he has had over 20 solo exhibits and has taken part in over 30 group exhibits in Israel and worldwide.
At the Jerusalem Biennale in 2017, Sher presented his installation “950m2 – Alternative Topographies,” which was displayed at the Tower of David Museum overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City walls. Composed of two series, “Maps of Jerusalem” and “Spoila,” the installation explores the idea of “perpetually devolving city space.”
At the pan-European art biennale, Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Italy, Sher’s installation addresses the issue of migration and refugees, making “bold, sometimes ironic use of symbols.”

“I am both an artist and architect who lives and works in Israel.
I am interested in the region on the Middle East’s history, archaeology, ancient scripts, and languages. My works are rooted in the graffiti and the Levant’s iconography and fuse contemporary art aesthetics while addressing the status of men in the universe.
My work contains many layers that reflect my personal experience, cultural background, personal and collective history, and the neighborhood where I reside.
I am an Israeli, living in a western country that is situated in the heart of the Levant, which I love and deeply influenced by its Muslim’s ornament, ancient visual languages, hieroglyphics, hints of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Egyptians, and others, cave paintings, ancient tombs, and Roman sarcophagus.

As an only son of a survivor from the Dachau ghetto, I grew up in a European and highly educated family but with fears and loneliness that was the cause of the horror of the Holocaust and stories told to me by my parents from that dark time of history of mankind. The ‘child-like’ parts of my works, as I see it, are my longing for a “normal” childhood.

I tend to work a lot on subjects of memories, marching figures, tombs, railroad tracks, etc…
I am a non-religious man but was raised in a liberal religious family.
Biblical stories and mythologies are part of my conscious and are being diffused in my works. Curators describe my works as Neo Primitivism, a work created in the present time but is nourished by the ancient cultures.

I have always been interested in the relationship between construction and deconstruction. I am working on cork boards mounted on wood, using a scorching wood pen, screwdrivers, gas burner, and hammers; I scratch, tear, engrave, burn the surface, and create works painting, etching, and intaglio.
Within the marks created from the extended processing, I seek a thread of narrative and form. These residues of action are for me and for the viewer trail markers to humankind’s primordial myths, such as the Creation and the Flood. References to biblical figures revered in Christianity and Islam reappear in many of my works, such as the recent Ten Plagues on obelisks.”

Read the full article on Art Market Magazine Issue #53