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Moshe Gershuni (Hebrew: משה גרשוני; 11 September 1936 – 22 January 2017) was an Israeli painter and sculptor. In his works, particularly in his paintings from the 1980s, he expressed a position different from the norm, commemorating the Holocaust in Israeli art. In addition, he created in his works a connection between bereavement and homoerotic sexuality, in the way he criticized society and Israeli Zionism-nationalism. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting for his work in 2003, but in the end it was revoked and he was deprived of receiving the prize.

Biography

Moshe Gershuni was born in 1936 to Yona and Zvi Kutner, who had migrated to Mandatory Palestine from Poland. Zvi, the head of the family, who was an agronomist and farmer, "hebraicized" the family name from Kutner to Gershuni, after his father. His mother Yona, née Senior, acted in community theater in Poland and made hats in Tel Aviv. The family lived in Tel Aviv on Hahashmal Street, and in 1939 moved to Mazeh Street. In 1938 Mira, Moshe's sister, was born, and in 1943, his brother Avshalom was born. Moshe was sent to the religious Bilu School and then continued his studies in a religious high school.

His father managed to save several family members from the Holocaust by arranging immigration certificates (certifikatim) to Mandatory Palestine, but some of his mother's relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. Gershuni described in a late interview the presence of the Holocaust in his childhood: "My mother was troubled all the rest of her life that she had not succeeded in bringing them here. And, like many others, I remember the years after the war [...] I remember that I read everything I could on the subject, there were already personal accounts of it on the radio, in private conversations, from the relatives who arrived. [...] it was in my consciousness, it was almost the center of my consciousness, in spite of the fact that my early years included the founding of the State and the war with the Arabs, but everything was a function of that experience."

In 1952 the family moved from Tel Aviv to Herzliya, near to the family-owned orchards, in the Gan Rashal area. In 1954, Gershuni's induction into the army was postponed by half a year because he was underweight, but the date of induction in 1955 was also postponed by the death of his father in an auto accident. Gershuni took over his father's job in the orchards. After his father's death Gershuni began to move into the world of art. The painter Leon Fouturian and the sculptor Uri Shoshany, both residents of Herzliya, influenced him. From 1960 to 1964 he studied sculpture in night courses at Avni Institute of Art and Design, after days spent working in the orchards. His teachers were Dov Feigin and Moshe Sternschuss, members of the "New Horizons" group, which during these years was beginning to lose the central place it had held in the world of Israeli art.

In 1964 he married Bianca Eshel, who was also a student in the Avni Institute and a widow of an Israeli Air Force pilot who had been killed in the Sinai Campaign. After the wedding the couple moved to Ra'anana. In addition to Eshel's daughter from her first marriage, a son, Aram Gershuni, was born to them in 1967 and a second son, Uri Gershuni, in 1970.

From "Pre-Conceptual" Art to "Post-Minimalist" Art, 1969–79

Presence, Absence, Body

Gershuni's artistic path began with abstract sculpture, strongly influenced by pop art. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1969 in the Israel Museum. On the walls of the museum were hung yellowish green abstract paintings in a geometric style, and throughout the space of the exhibition itself were strewn objects made of soft materials influenced by the sculptor Claes Oldenburg.

In the 1970s Gershuni produced a series of works influenced by the conceptual art of Europe and America. Yona Fischer who, in his position as Curator of the Israel Museum during those years, encouraged these trends, in retrospect stated that "the understanding that conceptual activity was what was developing here was not yet fully focused." As the influence of conceptual art, particularly American conceptual art, seeped in, "post-minimalist" art, which was concerned with examining the material values of art (Formalism), while attempting to strengthen the status of artistic activity, began to develop in Israel. In addition, this type of art emphasized the ontological dimension of artistic works. Instead of objectives with a commercial aesthetic, this genre adopted a freer relationship with minimalist values and emphasized the exposure of the process of the artist at work. At the same time, it examined and subverted the values of society about its political and social views.

Gershuni's first important works made use of automobile tires ("Inner Tubes"). The use of this material constituted a continuation of his preoccupation with soft materials, but Gershuni introduced new characteristics which had been absent in his work before. In "The Spirit is Willing, But the Flesh is Weak" (1969), for example, Gershuni exhibited inner tubes lined up in a row along a wall. The title of the work, taken from "Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 26:41)," referred to the gap between the body and the spirit, and between the perception of reality and human consciousness. A similar work was exhibited in 1970 in the "Group Autumn Exhibition" in the Helena Rubenstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art. Gershuni created a large sculptural installation called "Inner Tubes," which included rows of 64 tire inner tubes arranged in piles and creating a net ("grid") in the style of minimalist art. The work received broad public exposure because of a television reporter on Channel 1 who visited the exhibition and focused on Gershuni's sculpture as an uncompromisingly curious object.

Another work that shows Gershuni's ironic relationship with the grid is "Margarine Cubes on Paper" (1970). The work documented, in effect, an activity in which margarine cubes melted into the paper, while emphasizing the sensual aspect of the material. A reinforcement of this tendency can be seen in two videos Gershuni prepared for a television show created by Jacques Katmor for Israeli Television. In the video clip "Crawling" (1970; 32 seconds, black and white), Gershuni implemented an activity of signing with his body. He is photographed dressed in an Israeli army uniform, crawling over a dune in two opposing directions that are combined with one another. In this way, a kind of sign, in the form of an X was formed. This activity was described in retrospect by Ilana Tannenbaum as an act of ars poetica, which voids and cancels out the action it performs, at the same time as it makes an ironic statement about the Israeli military. Another work that was shown on the program included the covering up or sealing of the television screen "from the inside" with black paint.

Another series of works, also from 1970, is a series of drawings on fragments of paper, with names like "The Paper Looks White, but Inside, Within, It Is Black." In these works Gershuni emphasizes the edges of the paper by tearing it or blackening it. These actions, according to Gershuni, were intended to show "that paper has thickness, that it is three-dimensional." By pointing out the interior dimension of the paper, Gershuni was trying to indicate – ironically – the "beyond," that is the transcendental dimension of art.

In the group of works that Gershuni created during the first half of the decade, content that diverged from questions of the characteristics of pure artistic representation began to appear. At the same time, Gershuni preserved the characteristics of form within conceptual art, that is, its arrangement in series, the use of text, and the reflexive dimension of the works. Among the new characteristics that appeared in his works was a whole series of clearly biographical references, both to the artist and to his family. In his work "My Father…