Yehudit Sasportas

Born in 1969 in Ashdod, Israel, Yehudit Sasportas lives and works in Berlin and Tel Aviv. Sasportas uses a range of media including drawing, painting, video and installation. Drawing on her personal history, her celebrated work “The Seamstress and The Carpenter” (2001) exemplifies the artist’s complex engagement with surface pattern and architectural structures. She has carried this preoccupation through in her more recent explorations that deal with landscape. Sasportas’s meticulously hand-finished pieces are invested with rigorous draftsmanship, allowing for wildly conflicting references and time-scales to co-exist: from fossilized imprints to energy bursts, natural motifs to digital imagery, primordial wilderness to ecological disaster zones. The layered works that are the result of her practice compress different registers of representation – including drawings from life, traces from projected images and audio recordings captured onsite – into installations that immerse the viewer into the scene while shrouding the original location in ambiguity. Inspired by German romanticism, Sasportas’s landscapes are allegories for the human psyche. The works’ diffuse light sources and indeterminate settings are suggestive of inner projections, flattening out into reflective screens and opening onto murky clearings.

Yehudit Sasportas is slated for a solo exhibition at Galerie EIGEN + ART, Leipzig in 2011 and at Herbert-Gerisch-Stiftung, Neumünster in Novermber 2010. She has recently presented solo shows and projects at Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2009), DA2 Domus Artium 2002, Salamanca (2009), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2008) and in the Israeli Pavilion for the 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice (2007). Her work has also been shown as part of “Ornament and Pride” at S.M.A.K., Gent (2009), “Wallworks” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2009), “Real Time: Art in Israel 1998-2008” at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2008), “Gegen den Strich” at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2007), “Raft of the Medusa” at the National Museum, Warschau & Krakow (2006) as well as the 1st Valencia Art Biennial, Valencia (2001) and the 6th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (1999). She has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Israeli Ministry of Culture Award for Excellency in the Arts (2009), the Chosen Artist Award of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation (2003-2005), The Israeli Art Prize, Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation, Tel Aviv Museum of Art (1999), Young Artist Award, Israeli Ministry of Culture (1996), the Helena Rubinstein Award for Sculpture, America-Israel Cultural Foundation (1994-1998), Ehud Elhanani Prize for Academic Achievements, Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design (1993) and the Robert Steinmann Prize for Sculpture, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (1993).

Yehudit Sasportas is represented by Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin and Leipzig, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

For additional information about this artist, visit Mutual Art