Real Time
Art in Israel 1998 -2008
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Sixty Years of Art in Israel is a joint project involving six major museums across the country, each presenting the art of a single decade. The exhibition at the Israel Museum surveys the past ten years through painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation art, including site-specific works that were created especially for this project. The works in Real Time are by artists who have achieved prominence in the past ten years, leaving their mark on the art scene and expressing the new spirit of the time.

Many of the works in the exhibition convey a fear of impending global catastrophe and a yearning for escape to distant realms, real or imagined. They propose wild primeval settings or realms of fantasy and myth. For the most part, the here and now is absent from these works: those in which immediate local realities are evident either observe life in Israel from a distance, framing the political present in mythical time, or else they reveal dark currents flowing beneath the surface.

In Israel, as in the rest of the world, the last decade in art has seen the full emergence of new mediums and the creation of remarkably polished, technically meticulous works. Seductive beauty, theatricality, and the choice of large, often vast, dimensions have combined to produce a powerful visual and emotional experience. The art of Israel’s most recent decade crosses many boundaries, as it aims at a total impact on the viewer and as it assumes a prominent role on the global stage.