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
