Leor Grady: Pioneer

In 2023, Petach Tikva Museum of Art launched a residency program in its Print Workshop, where artists create series of screenprints and/or drypoints. The core of the collection consists of thousands of artworks in diverse media, acquired through donations and bequests, recounting the history of art in Israel from the early 20th century to the present. Artists-in-residence were invited to create new works inspired by

the Museum’s collection. Leor Grady (b. 1966), selected for the program’s first round, explores collective narratives pertaining to identity and place. He maps the domestic and mundane, transforming them into a sensual, symbolic space. During his residency, he embarked on an exploration of the collection space, tracing its structure as well as architectural infrastructure, the arrangement of partitions and drawers, and the gaps between them. His gaze reviewing the collection space was documented in photographs, which he then translated into screenprints composed of vertical and horizontal strokes reproduced in multiple variations. As in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “The Library of Babel,” which describes an immense library built from replicated systems of hexagonal rooms and corridors, Grady’s collection space becomes an endless space, whose perspective is concealed amid the pleats of a curtain-like grid, and its coloration shifts between the two shades dominating his work: blue and gold. The deep, velvety blue evokes the religious sublime of the Torah curtain and the performative act of space demarcation, calling to mind French artist Yves Klein, while the gold stands for sanctity and spirituality, alluding to traditions of embroidery and jewelry. Both colors are substances in varying densities, substrates set against the white expanses of paper, which is not a mere surface, but a lead actor embodying the void. A recurring motif in Grady’s work, the curtain appears in the prints as an abstraction. It symbolizes sensuality and passion, while also corresponding with its presence in philosophical discourse and art history as a representation of a pleat or passage; as a symbol of concealment and camouflage, and at the same time—a marker of cultural and

political exposure. Of all the works in the collection, Grady was drawn to The Pioneer, a 1930s sculpture by the Cubist- Futurist artist Zeev Ben-Zvi (1904—1952), and to its positioning on the storage shelves. He imprisoned the sculpture in a golden cage, offering a view from below that highlights the longitudinal lines (warp) of his newly created abstract, quasi-textile composition. As in “The Library of Babel,” which holds every book, and at the same time nothing of significance, Grady reflects on the physical and psychological nature of museum collections, and by extension—questions the meaning and relevance of collective concepts such

as pioneering and Zionism. In another series, he harnesses the screenprint technique to a different painterly gesture. The system of lines and stains converses with Moshe Kupferman’s painting, in which dense layers of purple and gray intertwine. He transforms his gaze at the interstices in the collection’s perspectival space into a powerful horizontal movement, pointing to itself while being reproduced. Just as in the Japanese printmaking tradition, where defining myths are unfolded in a horizontal movement, one woodprint next to another,

Grady creates a scroll anchored in the language of Israeli modernist painting, examining its underlying principles, as he juxtaposes the installed works with a plywood surface that alludes to the Want of Matter. In his book Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974), Georges Perec attempts to grasp space by tracing words on a page: “I incite blanks, spaces (jumps in the meaning: discontinuities, transitions, changes of key)” (trans.: John Sturrock). From the collection’s concrete physical space, while marking the passages and blanks between corridors and storage shelves and the works themselves, Grady creates the (cognitive and material) abstract space of the art stored in it.

Workshop Director and Master Printer: Moshe Roas
Assistant Master Printer: Zeev Wolf Wax

Installation photographs: Tal Nisim