Tel-Aviv Berlin, Andrea Peschel

Curator: Tal Ben Zvi

This is the first exhibition in Israel for the artist Andrea Peschel (1970), a German painter who lives in Berlin. The paintings Tel-Aviv Berlin are based on sketches and photographs made in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem in the course of a several-months visit in Israel last spring. They were later on painted in Berlin. The paintings are a delayed impression of the urban and human Tel-Aviv view in the Nechlat-Binyamin area, and of the Old City in Jerusalem.

The paintings describe calm scenes of everyday life, and only the faces of the people in cafes, on buses or passing by in the street expose the existential tension of the Israeli street. The painter describes prolonged actions, a sense of observation of someone who is a passerby and does not take an active part in the occurrences and the space she describes.

The paintings, in the tradition of the German expressionist painting, combine expressive and almost abstract brushstrokes that eventually create a sharp and clear image of a realist scene. But a gap is formed in them, a tension between the realism of the artist's perception of the local moment, and the foreignness that arises from the paintings. The sense of foreignness is intensified when the painting surface is grayish, with European colors that do not reflect the light and illumination of the local scene described in it.

The realist documentation through painting places the gaze objects of the passersby at the center of the painting, gaze objects that exceed from her German daily routine and mark the objects of the painting as exceedingly local. But this is not an anthropological or an orientalist gaze, but rather a sober and humane gaze that shakes off tourist painting schemes and seeks the humane and everyday within the space she describes.