November 29th a personal exhibition of Shir Shvadron was opened in the Tel-Aviv Artists House – “Shir Shvadron – Paintings”. Curator: Yuval Kaspi. The exhibition is open till December 23rd.

Video: Leonid Zeiger

Shir Shvadron exhibits a small and intimate show at the Tel Aviv Artists House in late 2012. Likewise, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition documents only a handful of his works, about a hundred paintings carefully selected from many hundreds of drawings and paintings on paper and canvas, painted books, and more and more papers… a world that stretches across over flowing drawers in the studio and on the walls of the flat on HaAvoda Street . The selected works seek to highlight the intensive and significant artistic oeuvre of Shir Shvadron. It is a modest exhibition aptly titled: “Shir Shvadron – Paintings “.

Shir Shvadron’s painting is of the classical kind, seen less and less these days; a classic in a postmodern era.

Shir Shvadron studied art at Wizo-France High, and continued to Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, where he spent his formative years as an artist. He arrived at Bezalel in the early 1970s. Although he attended the academy in the “conceptual years”, he did not follow that path, and insisted on painting as the point of departure of his artistic practice . For many years Shvadron has been looking at the world through the eyes of a painter, be it in his studio at the Yad Eliyahu shelter, in outdoor excursions around the country or in his travels throughout the world. For some forty years, Shir Shvadron has been observing and painting.

The exhibition “Shir Shvadron – Paintings” seeks to look at four different bodies of work that Shvadron created in 1977-2012. It is not a retrospective exhibition but rather an exhibition that wishes to delineate the portrait of the artist through the four classic categories of his painting’s subject matters. At the basis of that choice was the thought that it is in fact through those classic and seemingly exhausted subjects from the history of art that Shvadron manages to compose an original statement about the subjects of his painting in particular and Israeli painting in general. These categories are: landscape, still life, self-portrait and figure painting.

This exhibition and the catalogue accompanying it offer a new outlook on Shir Shvadron’s works. An outlook that weaves together all the works with a fine thread and identifies the personal touch and attentiveness to color and material in all of them. An outlook that offers to see in the landscapes, the figures and the cup, the image of Shir himself: Shir the teacher, Shir the painter, Shir the artist and most of all, Shir the generous, loving , kind and observing person.

Excerpts from “Shir.Love.” by the curator Yuval Kaspi.
Catalogue of the exhibition “Shir Shvadron – Paintings”.
November 2012, Tel Aviv.