Eran Webber: Embodiment
Curator: Ron Bartos
Assistant curator: Dr. Lia Moran Gilad
The Negev Museum of Art is proud to present Eran Webber: Embodiment, the first solo museum exhibition of Eran Webber – a virtuoso sculptor and one of the only artists in the local art scene who works in the spirit of classical figurative sculpture.
Webber (b. 1980) studied in Florence, Italy, first at the Academy of Fine Arts and later at the Florence Academy of Art (FAA), where he serves as a senior lecturer in sculpture. Upon his return to Israel in 2013, he founded the sculpture department at Hatahana Studio School in Tel Aviv as well as the Webber Atelier in Moshav Habonim – an independent sculpture workshop that also serves as his studio. Webber’s art, then, has deep roots in the traditions of sculpture, between classicism and early modernism. If we wanted to outline its characteristics, we could note that Webber’s sculpture is figurative and realistic; faithful to the language of naturalistic portrayal; exquisitely crafted in its finishes yet still divulges the touch of the artist’s hand on its surface; and reveals traces of romantic admiration and fascination with archetypes. However, the main focus of his expression is on the human soul and the emotional world of the individual, and how they are shaped by the unmediated impression that emerges during the life sculpting or drawing session.
The exhibition is dedicated to a two-year artistic chapter that centers around one significant sculpture – a sculpture that is a human anti-monument, a life-size portrait of a woman; a sculpture that captures the figure of Michal Yagel Alonim. Webber spent two years sculpting the likeness of his neighbor and friend Michal. Two years during which he sculpted her changing appearance and waning body, as she slowly succumbed to an incurable neurodegenerative disease (ALS). This is how the sculpture Michal, which is stands at the heart of the exhibition, came about, as well as the documentary May I Speak to You of Life by Gal and Maya Raveh – two complementary works that unfold a story about life and about parting from life.
The sculpture of Michal is shaped as a free-standing, upright sculpture. Michal’s focal points are her closed eyes and outstretched arms. Her facial features are at once relaxed and shrunken – both a death mask and a life mask. Michal’s body is half-naked and wrapped in fabric, whose folds were formed in the finest tradition of classicist drapery, evocative of a dress, a sheet, a shroud, or a cocoon. The choice of a cocoon is in fact a choice in metamorphosis, meaning, in change rather than loss, just like Webber’s choice in additive sculpting. This is a very significant decision that embodies a sculptural concept, since classical sculpture is often created through a process of removing material (e.g., carving in wood, chiseling in stone), and perhaps sculpting through subtraction (reduction and removal) would have been more fitting of Michal’s material likeness. However, therein lies a significant aspect of the sculpture’s essence, since additive sculpting means choosing change over giving up, forming over dismantling, affirmation over negation. In that sense, the sculpture Michal was created in an inverse relation to its subject matter: as Michal experienced more and more limitations, restricted movement, and loss of motor functions, the sculpture took on shape, transcended, gained volume, and crystalized.
Look at Michal’s arms and notice how she invites us to place our hands in her delicate hands. In contrast to the inward gaze intimated by her closed eyes, her arms seek an external expression and contact with another body – to ask or provide help, to offer solace. The sculptor continues to believe that it is still possible, perhaps more so now – to recognize and even establish ourselves by recognizing the other, by holding hands, as an echo of the words “Your hands made me and fashioned me.”
