group of works

Cast Whale Project

Gil Shachars »The Cast Whale Project at St. Elisabeth« 2018 hat Gil Shachar, Galeriekünstler von Semjon Contemporary in Berlin-Mitte, in Südafrika nach intensivem Verhandeln mit dem südafrikanischen Umweltministerium einen gestrandeten Buckelwal abformen können....

Sculpture

Relief

Schattenzeichnung

Ohne Titel

exhibitions

2020 – Lunapark Transylvania

Gil Shachar – Lunapark Transylvania 22. August – 10. Oktober 2020 Der Titel weist schon in eine mögliche assoziative Richtung, die zu denken hier nicht uner- wünscht ist: Der Begriff Lunapark steht wohl für jeden für einen Amusement- und Them- enpark, wie er heute...

2018 – dead flat

Gil Shachar – Dead Flat24.4. – 26.5.2018 In seiner aktuellen Ausstellung Dead Flat zeigt uns Gil Shachar zwei phänotypisch vollkommen unterschiedliche Werkgruppen, die jedoch auf dem gleichen Herstellungsprinzip der Abformung eines realen 'Objektes' basieren. Zum...

2016 – Skulptur

Info

Gil Shachar – The inward gaze out into the world

Looking at Gil Sachar’s work, one immediately realises that the artist is an explorer and a creative interpreter, an artist who ultimately tries to understand and make sense of the world on our behalf.

The fact that he is able to breathe new life, a new soul into his realistic bust portraits, into the emerging art figure, is something you experience immediately when you see his portrait sculptures for the first time. As on all previous heads and busts, the eyes of the protagonists are closed. This is due to the fact that the face of a living person obviously cannot be cast with the eyes open. Out of this vice he has made a virtue, for the sculptures gain an aura entirely of their own, namely that of looking inwards out into the world.

And when, on his largest sculptural work to date, the stranded humpback whale, the eyes are missing because it is lying on its back (the head was half-sunk in the sand), what is already inherent in his earlier work is potentiated here: namely the inward gaze, because the non-mirroring of the closed or, in this case, missing eyes of the mighty object of our attention throws us back on ourselves, and we allow ourselves to unabashedly deepen the otherwise discreet gaze (cf. the chapter on the Cast Whale Project).

But his casts of crumpled paper and draped cloths also breathe life. They seem so real that one is tempted to breathe at them to make them sway. If Shachar now reduces his ‘papers’ to a circular form (or to a collectivity of circles), they become an abstract and monochrome, but vibrantly shaped sign.

His work group of shadow portraits again points back to ourselves. The even dotting with the graphite pencil to generate the portrait makes it seem to grow sculpturally into space, even if it is only the shadow, which knows neither depth nor front or back.