TANYA PREMINGER | THE GREAT GODDESS

TANYA PREMINGER | THE GREAT GODDESS

“My purpose is to express the immaterial essence of things in physical stuff: to make tangible the universal essence of the creation.” – Tanya Preminger

Tanya Preminger is a sculptor born in the Soviet Union in 1944.
Preminger graduated with M.A. from the Surikov Academy of Arts, Moscow. Russia moved to Israel in 1972, where she since lives and works in Arsuf Kedem, Israel.
Preminger works in various art media: sculpture, landscape art, installation, and photography. In her long artistic life career, she had exhibited over 30 exhibitions in Israel between 1978 – 2011, including at The Negev Museum, Open Museum Omer, Ramat Gan Museum, Herzelia Museum, Lutshansky Museum, Painters’ and Sculptors’ Association Gallery, Tova Osman Gallery, Artists’ House Jerusalem, and Efrat Gallery.
In addition, during the past 30 years, she has participated in dozens of group exhibitions in Israel and participated in over 130 Sculpture Symposiums and Competitions worldwide.
Tanya’s monumental works and Environmental projects (over 130 sculptures) were installed in Israel and many countries around the globe.

Tanya Preminger | The Great Goddess
By Dr. Gideon Ofrat, Art Historian and Critique.

Preminger embarked on her artistic career in Israel after immigrating in 1972 at the age of twenty-eight from the Soviet Union, where she had studied at the Moscow Academy of Art. She first worked with wood, paint, and other materials that “corresponded” with Russian folk toys (an exhibition at the Sharet Gallery, Givatayim, 1987, curator: Igal Ben-Nun). Indeed, a free ludic quality, which has preserved the spirit of an eternal child, is the key to the artist’s astonishingly creative world. Her prolific work with an unlimited range of materials and media bespeaks a dynamic world that cuts across definitions: she touches on archaic sculpture, pop art, geometric minimalism, earthwork, figurative sculpture, garden design, conceptuality, body sculpture, anything.

Already in her 1988 exhibition at the Herzliya Museum, curated by Yoav Dagon, and no more than a year after the “toy” exhibition, her inexhaustible passion for sculpting, her creative verve, and fiery imagination have attested to her venture into new artistic domains. A minimalist sensibility directed Preminger to basic forms sawed in parallel lines and to new materials, such as wire hoops, Perspex disks, etc., which defied the raw stone again and again. Geometric drawing-line abstraction defied biomorphic lines. A printing mold carved into stone was combined with tiny plastic imprints. The Earth had begun to speak its mind, and the spirit of the Eros myth erupted from its entrails. From then on, any material, any medium was suitable, and, as in the well-known spiritual, “she’s got the world in her hands.”

Until the late 1980s and early 1990s, one could still notice where Preminger’s archaistic stone sculptures were indebted to Dalia Meiri’s basalt sculpture or to Avraham Ofek’s mythical stone sculptures (five-round hollows she carved into a basalt rock in 1989 are reminiscent of Ofek’s biblical sculptures from the late 1970s. Clock, which she created in 1989 by setting up mostly raw basalt rocks, brings to mind Dalia Meiri’s work of the early 1980s). But at that time, the Earth and rocks began to grow protrusions resembling the horns of a prehistoric animal, and the soil was piled up into a mound shaped like a horned altar (Altar, 1990; hair placed at the altar head represented remnants of Eros). The Earth began to seethe, and, as early as 1989, it grew mysterious bellies or spurted swollen orifices on the lawn. The Earth displayed a giant, yawning vaginal trench, which, in 1989, was a swollen fissure in the Earth with red flowers planted around it as a symbol of blood, or it “became pregnant” with a swollen body with bursting hair, etc. Such is the divine mother’s epiphany in Preminger’s work.

Preminger’s work is based on systemic disruption. Her sculptures, which confirm her interference with the cosmic order, insist on bringing about changes in and deviations from absolute categories and rational order. The Kabbalah claims God created the world as a lark, and Preminger, too, seems to create out of such ludic impulse. She is, indeed, the great goddess: she transforms solid into liquid (hard into soft), inanimate into animate, small into large, a practical domestic object into an impractical exterior object, and so on. In her domestic-object sculptures, she responds to the stay-at-home woman with the vigor of the free woman-goddess who torments kitchen utensils and products.

In 1998 Preminger created Baggage, a 1.4-meter-long heavy rectangular body designed like a movable object for human transport, with two handles on each side, a sort of thick stretcher that cannot be carried. Yet another paradox. The sculpture inevitably evokes a coffin or biblical Holy Ark. This is the duality of the containers the people of Israel carried on their wandering through the Sinai desert: the Ark of the Covenant and the coffin with Joseph’s remains.
Either way, Preminger’s ark-coffin is a piece of furniture emptied of its sacredness, whether life’s or God’s.

Totally anonymous, this “Baggage” bears no marks of either the Torah or the dead’s name. The only language here is that of sculpture. The “Baggage” is a movable stone block from which the artist will “beget” anything she wishes.
The great goddess creates sculptures, and the sole “sacred” is a sculpture.

The great mother is mother to four children and a spate of sculptures, mythical and anti-mythical. Preminger creates a ritual sculpture and winks. In every pathos, she implants the seed of smiling, which is the seed of disruption and subversion that counter male omnipotence with female omnipotence. All her sculptures populate a universe where her udder-altars are “grazing,” imposing their power everywhere.

Read the full article in Art Market Magazine Issue #66