A wonderful exhibition of Ira Reichwarger (1951 – 2001) is currently presented in the Museum of Art, Ein Harod (open till May 2011). We have met Galia Bar Or, director and curator of the museum.

Interview and video: Lena and Leonid Zeiger. April 2011.

Venus of Jaffa
Mordechai Geldman in conversation with Jan Rauchwerger

MG: I met a friend in a café this week, a woman of about sixty, who is very much involved in the arts. When I mentioned the planning of Ira’s (Irina Reichwarger, 1951-2001) upcoming exhibition in the Ein Harod Museum, she exclaimed, instantly: “Wonderful! It’s a reparation.” (Reparation: In the Hebrew: Tikkun, a cabalistic term.- MG). To my surprise, the word reparation that spontaneously sprang from her, matched the word reparation that has been lingering in my own thoughts. I almost jumped from my seat. Why is it, I wondered, that the word reparation feels so appropriate here? I remember well Ira’s last years, when I, occasionally, had a glimpse into her life, more thanks to my connection to you than my limited connection to her. She suffered, physically and mentally, she hardly worked at all, and deteriorated more and more, until she died after an accident at home. It was a tragic end to a wonderful artist, whom I admired from the very first time I saw her work. When you told me you’re putting together an exhibition to show the best of her oeuvre, I saw it as a reparation.
JR: I think the exhibition comes to repair the existing situation. Currently, many are not familiar with Ira’s work, and there are several reasons for this. Therefore it is important that they see again, and anew, the body of her work so that she may recapture the place she deserves in the Israeli art world – so that she and her extraordinary artistic achievements are not forgotten.
MG: This is how I understand your answer: The fitting reparation, in your view, is to show her works again, and so reclaim her place in the Israeli art world.
JR: Making her work available again to the public is a significant measure of reparation. But the word reparation also refers to their physical reparation. The works were in an appalling condition, stored away in the stockrooms of galleries, and I had to rescue and restore them. The sculptures especially were in a terrible shape, and I feared that they may be lost for good in basements and closets. I had to find them and restore them before including them in the exhibition.



MG: Thus, the words “tragic” and “reparation” acquire an additional meaning here, because of what has happened not only to Ira, but to her works as well.
JR: I knew that her works were stored in the galleries that had bought them. I also knew that they were not kept in perspex boxes, or mounted on their bases. At the time, Ira and I didn’t think much about the preservation of her works. When Horace Richter – the owner of the Richter Gallery in Jaffa and the exclusive collector of Ira’s work – was still alive, the sculptor Ilana Gur, who was Richter’s neighbor, contacted me and asked that I help her mount a sculpture of Ira’s that consisted of two figures and which Ilana wanted to show in her museum. Showing the sculpture was meant as a gesture to Ira, whose work Ilana has always admired, but she wasn’t able to put together the two figures. And I said to myself: If an artist like Ilana has difficulty figuring out how to mount the sculpture, no one would know how these works are to be shown. Especially when they are poorly stored in the galleries. Motti, Ira’s and my son, took photographs of the works in storage. It was painful to see how neglected they were. I, in the meantime, had several large exhibitions, and I felt as though a great injustice had been committed, and that the audience of today should be exposed to Ira’s work. I said to myself that if I don’t see to it that this happens, she would vanish as if she never existed.
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