Mordechai Geldman* in conversation with Jan Rauchwerger

Her flesh turned from itself
into the sheets of light.
She began to wake; her hair spilled
into the rivers of shadow.
Her eyes half-open, she saw the man
across the room,
she watched him and could
not choose between sleep and
wakefulness.
And he watched her
and the moment became their lives
so that she would never rise or
turn from
him so that he would always be
there.

Mark Strand
from She by Mark Strand’s, The Story of Her Life, 1973, New York: Atheneum.

T h e  E x h i b i t i o n

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.
MG: I saw the photographs that Motti had taken. The works in the closets looked like slaughtered
chickens in a freezer. It was painful to look at, even shocking.
JR: While Ira’s works waste away in storage, it’s as if they still exist, but in fact they do not exist. What’s to be done with them? Will the gallery owners sell them in the state they are? Nothing will remain of them – no one can even begin to guess if a sculpture should be upright or prostrate. The works will become amorphous.
MG: And you remembered how to restore and mount them?
JR: Each sculpture is supported by a wire construction. I helped Ira make these constructions from her sketches. I’ve always known the structure, the subject and the composition of every sculpture. And there also remain preliminary drawings, sketches, and even photographs. No one, I said to myself, will be able to restore these sculptures but me.
MG: This must feel like a great responsibility.
JR: Mounting the sculptures involves an additional element. Usually, long and sharp iron filaments
from the metal construction of the sculpture got in Ira’s way and she had no patience for them, especially since they sometimes tore into the nylon stockings that wrapped the work. And so she demanded that I cut them off. But they could have helped when we had to tie the legs or the behind to the base. If I took off those filaments then, it was necessary to restore them now in order to mount the sculptures.
MG: You’ve restored the sculptures to their bases with the technical knowledge of a collaborator in
their creation.
JR: In fact, I couldn’t sleep nights. The neglected state of the works disturbed my conscience, even
though I’m not really to blame. But, I couldn’t help feeling guilty.
MG: The bond between the two of you was strong and vital. You were married for many years.( Jan changed his name to Rauchwerger (from Reichwarger) in 1984 – MG).
JR: Fifteen years.
MG: And you have kids together, whom I find especially charming. I also remember that after the two of you separated, the relationship between you continued. During Ira’s most tragic instances – when she collapsed as an artist and a human being – you still played a significant role in her life. And she lived near you. I assume that period was very difficult for you and the kids.
JR: The bond between us also had to do with making art. Over the years, even when we weren’t together, I continued to look at Ira’s work and offer my opinion. Eventually, she no longer sculpted and mainly drew and painted. As if something had been cut and done with. She made very few sculptures and only by commission.
MG: It is clear, I believe, that what drives this exhibition are profound emotions.
JR: True. After all, we do have kids together. But, the way I see it, this has more to do with the
sense of duty one artist feels toward another. I began to think of an exhibition about five years after Ira’s passing. I was tormented by thoughts about her continued existence and place in the art history of Israel. And this exhibition closes a few circles. When I began thinking about it, I had to decide if we wanted a small or a large exhibition; this decision dictated the direction we took.
MG: So what’s in the show? What is the direction you took? What became possible?
JR: Ira left drawings and watercolors that she had made during the last twenty years of her life, some of which were shown when she was still alive. I’m not a fan of large exhibitions, and since her painting and her sculpting are two different worlds, I thought it preferable to present, essentially, her soft sculptures, which she made when she was twenty-four to thirty years old, as well as a selection of works on paper. This decision was made with the assistance of Meira Lehman-Perry from the Israel Museum, and Galia Bar Or from the Ein Harod Museum. Our objective is to rediscover an artist who was very much appreciated by her peers and the public at large, which is quite rare in the history of art.
MG: How so?
JR: There are many artists we admire today, but who were not appreciated by the public in their lifetime. In Ira’s case, the public responded enthusiastically to the sculptures she made. People stood on long lines to see her work. To one of her exhibitions at the Richter Gallery, for instance, so many visitors arrived, some of them with children, we were concerned that the fragile dolls would be damaged. In order to reduce the number of visitors, we followed Dan Ben Amotz’s advice and charged an entry fee. Among the visitors were artists who came to draw her sculptures. In art school we drew
sculptures of Michelangelo, Donatello, but here, artists much older than Ira came to draw her dolls. In other words, her sculptures brought about a special joy, which, I believe, stemmed from the way they touched on life. Anyone could have used the materials she used for her sculptures, they were, and are, very accessible, but no one handled them the way she did.
MG: She brought about a mythological miracle of sorts, turning hay into gold.

T h e A r t i s t

MG: Let’s talk a little about Ira’s development as an artist. Where did she come from, how did she get here, what did she find here? How did it all happen, the miracle of her creations and the tragedy of her life?
JR: Ira was born in Moscow, in 1951, to a family of artists. Her mother, Zoya V. Rellieva, who is 91
years old, is a well known painter and sculpture. She’s been living in Israel since 1975, and her granddaughters call her Grandma Zoya.
MG: I recall seeing in Jaffa a gorgeous head she’s made of clay.
JR: I met her in Moscow, where she mounted huge bronze sculptures that received a lot of attention. But she also made dolls as children’s toys – tin soldiers, horses, and various historical figures in famous battle scenes. Ira’s father, Alekseii A. Tatsij (1902-1958 ), was the chief architect in the Ukraine, and a professor of architecture at the Academy.
MG: Your father, too, was an artist.
JR: Ira was sixteen when she came to study with me in Moscow in 1967. I was ten years older than she was.
MG: You ran an art school?
JR: It was a private school that prepared students for the entry exams to the Art Academy. Ira studied
painting, drawing, and composition. After she was accepted to the Academy, I recommended that she continue to study with Weisberg, who taught me painting. She studied with him a few months, until he found out that we were a couple. He said he’d continue to be her teacher only if she left me. He claimed that if his students lived as a couple they’d be constantly fighting. With the years I realized he’d been quite right.
MG: I assume she’d stopped studying with him.
JR: Yes. She studied with him only for several months, but always considered herself his pupil. He did a beautiful portrait of her (included in the catalog), which is in my private collection. At any rate, I never thought she’d stay with me, that she’d be willing to leave Russia, her family and friends, and go to Israel with me. At the time, once you left, you couldn’t come back to visit. At twenty-one, she arrived in Israel with me.
MG: Where did you go? Did you know where you were headed?
JR: When I was asked where we were going, I always said that I was going to my mother. My mother and other members of my family made Aliya a year before Ira and I did. I’d sent them ahead of us to prepare the ground for Ira and me.
MG: Your father was no longer living?
JR: Father passed away four months after he’d arrived in Israel, and the family had a hard time helping us, the young couple.
MG: Where did they live?
JR: My mother and brother lived in Haifa; my brother worked in the labs of the Technion.
MG: You arrived in Haifa?
JR: They sent us to Tsfat because “it’s near Tel Aviv and the best artists live there.”
MG: Did you, in fact, find good artists there?
JR: The initial impression was very dismal, and depressing. We thought: If this is the local art, there’s nothing for us here. I was mad at myself for not having looked into this before coming here. But, a few days later the painter Aharon Giladi took us on a tour, to acquaint us with the artistic life in Tsfat, and he and the artists he introduced us to transformed our thinking. We got to know Lea Nickel, Frankel, Ephraim Lifshitz, Hanna Levi and Eliyau Gat. We met good artists.
MG: Ira began making dolls in Tsfat? How did she start?
JR: While we were still learning Hebrew at the Ulpan in Tsfat, there rose an occasional need to bring a gift to events we were invited to, and so Ira followed her mother’s example. Her mother used to make dolls of fabric as presents for children and adults. Ira also made Mickey Mouse dolls, Piggy dolls, and the like, as gifts. When she had some leisure time, she began making other dolls, as self-expression. Aharon Giladi loved her work. He was also very taken with us as a couple in the arts, and he organized
an event for us where we showed our work before some of Tsfat’s artists. They were all very appreciative and encouraging, even though we didn’t have much to show. The painter Leo Kan wanted to purchase a work of Ira’s, but we had no idea how to price it. We’d never sold a work before. He wanted to buy a small doll, asserting that we didn’t understand its true value, refusing to buy it for the price we quoted, saying it was too low. We mentioned $70, which for us was a huge amount – we each left Russia with a $100. As said, I’ve never sold a painting before – in Moscow I made a living designing books – and Ira at the time knew nothing about money.
MG: It seems that even her very first dolls, the ones she made in Tsfat, were very compelling.
JR: Yes, everyone was very excited about them. After the Yom Kippur War, I began teaching at Avni, and then, in 1974, we moved to Tel Aviv. Here, Ira began working with the clear idea of sculpting in soft materials. At first, she used fabrics, until she discovered nylon stockings as material for her art. We couldn’t buy new stockings because of their price, so we looked for used ones and in colors that suited Ira’s plans; often, we didn’t find what we needed. Also, we didn’t know then where to find cotton in large quantities at a reasonable price. At the pharmacy it was too expensive. It took over a year to find a cotton factory in Holon, and to buy second rate stockings from Lodjia.
MG: Where did her first show take place?
JR: It took place at the Tzvi Noam Gallery, located in the Lavik House. Tzvi Noam, the owner of the gallery, possesses a great artistic sense, but it took some effort to convince him that Ira’s dolls were sculptures, deserving of a show in a gallery. But, even we didn’t dare, in the beginning, to call her dolls sculptures, and for quite a while we called them dolls. Don’t forget, we’re talking about the 70s. Today, thirty-five years later, things are different.
MG: In my opinion, a doll is an excellent appellation. In fact, there’s no real need to call the dolls sculptures. There’s a place for dolls in the history of art, just as there’s a place today for works of
embroidery, installations, performance art, works in video, holograms. There are paintings, and there are paintings. There are dolls, and there are dolls. I imagine the show was a great success.
JR: Two days before the opening of Ira’s first exhibition, we found a note from Horace Richter in our mailbox, asking that we contact him. At the time, his gallery in Jaffa had a very good reputation, as well as international connections. On the phone he told us he wanted to buy the entire show. During the preparations for the show, he went into the Tzvi Noam Gallery for a quick look, and then sent us the
note. He even suggested that we cancel the show and so save on the commission payable to the gallery. When the show ended, most of the works went to him. On a local scale, the show was a huge success. Especially so in view of the fact that during that period the mood in the Israeli street was quite somber, because of the Yom Kippur War.
MG: Indeed, it was a unique success, like a Hollywood picture. And Ira began to contribute to the family’s budget.
JR: Ira had an agreement with Horace Richter that he’d buy all her works. From 1975 to 1979 she had
a contract with Richter, and in those years we had Miri and Motti. During that time, the love for and the appreciation for Ira kept growing and it is safe to say that she became a famous artist. In 1980, when the collective gallery “Radius” opened, where they exhibited the works of instructors from Bezalel, they invited both of us to join as partners.
MG: How did she respond to her great success?
JR: At the beginning of the 80s, she experienced a sort of crisis in making the dolls, possibly because of her success. Her trust in the material diminished, and this despite her solo show in New York – Richter showed her sculptures there during the 1979 Expo. All through the show she sank into a depression, and left her brother’s apartment, where we were staying, only to go to the show, never into the city. It was winter, it was snowing, and New York looked like Moscow. When we returned to Israel, Ira made
a few more great works, but her passion for the medium had tapered off.
MG: Perhaps the material was no longer a source of inspiration.
JR: She said that, at that stage, she was making the sculptures for money and not for her own pleasure. She claimed she had trouble, physically, just handling the material.
MG: Something like a mental allergy.
JR: She felt that she had exhausted all that she had to express through the soft materials.
MG: It is also possible that she couldn’t tolerate the success.
JR: Possibly. She came from a Soviet artistic culture that viewed success as something that might interfere with the authenticity of an artist’s soul.
MG: There are quite a few artists in all fields who feared success, and were destroyed by it, and even committed suicide. You need the proper mental tools to deal with success without losing your creative core. An artist creates herself continuously, but when success comes, it’s as if you’ve been created instantly and finitely in and by the minds of others. You’re no longer a soul, but a persona, a social mask. Did she stop making sculptures?
JR: Not at all. During the same time she became friends with our neighbor, Tamara Jones, a successful fashion designer here and in Italy. Tamara suggested that they work together on a show: Ira will sculpt large figures from the materials she’s always worked in, and Tamara will clothe them in an “impossible fashion.” Ira agreed and worked with Tamara in the grotesque vein.
MG: Their collaboration bore fruit?
JR: The show was creative and vibrant, it received a lot of attention and was very successful. Many
people still remember it today. It was also shown in the U.S. to great acclaim. Tamara’s idea
uncovered a new facet in Ira she didn’t know about, and she created large figures, humorous
and grotesque, that matched Tamara’s fashion fantasies. This collaboration also revived Ira’s
interest in fashion.
MG: What happened after the show, which, interesting as it sounds, was a one-time project?
JR: Here enters the story of our house in Jaffa. I fell in love with a large and spectacular house. I put
down the key money and renovated it for an entire year. When renovations ended we found ourselves in a great house, where Ira had her own studio. But, the move into a house, and the adjustment to Jaffa, were difficult. The house was too big and required a lot of maintenance.
MG: She continued to sculpt there?
JR: Yes, but not right away. For a long time, Ira drew models in the nude twice a week. It was a kind of exercise, but she obtained excellent results. Meantime, her world was changing, a world in which I had no place, and so I left in the early 80s. Above all, she liked nothing better than consuming alcohol with friends in the big house, and later alone. This bohemian group of drinkers was mainly composed of new Russian artist émigrés, some of them already with important accomplishments in the art world. Ira grew attached to one of them – the poet Mikhail Gendlev. At the time, Ira said that if alcohol were to be taken from her, she’d have no personality left.
MG: I was once invited to one of their gatherings, where Ira introduced me to the artist and poet Mikhail Grobman, and to the extravagant Gendlev. What I saw there was a spirited Russian bohemia one could no longer find elsewhere in Israel. The local artists have long ensconced themselves in the image of a
quiet bourgeoisie, leaving behind the difficult and complicated ideal of the Impressionist bohemian, in the style of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and the others. I still remember their bottles of vodka, in particular those that contained lemon leaves. It seems to me that Ira became more and more desperate once you’ve started a new family in the mid-80s, and her affair with Gendlev was over. A psychoanalytic thought occurs to me, and I allow myself to express it here: If we look at Ira’s dolls as representations of the Great Mother, then her alcoholism was predictable, a kind of shift from a plane of sublimation to the “real,” to black milk. The alcohol is like mother’s milk, meant to satiate a bottomless lack, but also to destroy the desiring self. The desire to return and be swallowed again in the bosom of the Great Mother, often involves an excessive regression to the pleasure principle, fused with the wish for
self-annihilation.
JR: That’s very interesting. When I lived at the Citė in Paris in 1982-83, Ira worked on a show for the
Israel Museum. At the time, she was connected with the Sarah Kishon Gallery, who bought her
sculptures. Ephraim Kishon loved her sculpture very much, and kept many of them in his home
in Switzerland.
MG: What did you think of her show at the Israel Museum?
JR: The exhibition was shown in the series “Know the Israeli Artist” and it included great works, but Ira was no longer at her peak. I helped her, essentially, as a gofer, and I recall how, after I’d placed a sculpture in its designated place, Ira would put the final touches to it in ways that astounded me. She had a magic touch. The exhibition, though, left a bad taste in both of us because of Ira’s negative mood.
MG: In my view, and surely in yours as well, Ira’s story is particularly dramatic and tragic, which could easily be made into a riveting and very affecting novel or script. A very beautiful and very talented artist blossoms, she reaches the apex of her career, creating masterpieces and enjoying general and adoring attention. Then she begins to disintegrate, she turns to alcohol, loses her loved ones and dies in an accident.
JR: After she reached the high point in sculpting, she did achieve great results drawing and painting. In sculpting she found an outlet for her humor, for her natural inclination toward the grotesque and, in the main, for an exacting sense of touch she applied to new materials. In sculpting she enjoyed a creative freedom she didn’t have in painting. But, after some time, she did reach the depths in drawing and
painting that she’d achieved with relative ease in sculpting. In my opinion, in her dog drawings, and in her self-portraits, she achieved a singular depth and a great sensitivity. Ira left something wondrous in the memory of many. The dolls she created when she was at the peak of her powers are like a monument to her life.
MG: I very much like to think about those marvelous dolls as a monument to her life. It’s a very apt
way of expressing it.
JR: As we discussed earlier, the poor state of her works that were stored in the galleries is also a chapter in her tragic story. I began thinking about the show as an attempt to understand how you can elevate an artist and how you can kill her. As a young artist, she had achieved great success. Audiences and artists and museums sought her out. But, the gallery owners who loved and bought her works, couldn’t bring
themselves to part with them, or perhaps they thought that their monetary value would rise over time. At any rate, they did nothing with them, they never sold them, and did not manage to preserve them properly. The purpose of this show is to repair the remnants, to restore her work in the mind and consciousness of art lovers.

T h e W o r k s

JR: Ira’s first works that ended up in the collection of the Israel Museum were made in the 70s. These are dolls-sculptures with ethnographic characteristics. The human landscape in Israel – new to Ira and me – was a source of inspiration: Hasids, corpulent Sephardic women, Jewish weddings the likes of which we never saw in Moscow, but also the prostitutes on the corner of Hayarkon and Allenby Streets (the Avni Institute was located there at the time), stimulated her.
MG: The Modernists were very interested in prostitutes. Even the English poet T.S. Eliot, who was religious and conservative, wrote about them after his visit to Paris, apparently inspired by Baudelaire. Some Modernists went as far as equating the artist to a prostitute.
JR: Working on her sculptures, Ira looked for and used old nude photographs, like the erotic pornographic German photographs we grew up with, as they were routinely sold by the handicapped beggars in the trains of Russia.
MG: In my view, Ira’s major sculptures are connected to childhood, even early childhood, not only because they originate from the memory of the dolls her mother made for her, but essentially because you can see in them the presence of the mother’s figure – a woman who seems large and mature, the way the mother is always perceived by her small children. Moreover, one always experiences her sculptures, not only visually but also tactilely, very much like the child experiences its mother’s body. The body of the sculptures invites a close-up look at the skin, the same kind of look a child has when near the body of its mother or in her arms.
JR: But she was also influenced by Rubens’s large and fleshy women. She was often asked where she had seen such folds in a woman’s skin and belly, as are seen in her sculptures. People assumed she’d seen them in Russia. But the beautiful and skinny Ira claimed she’d seen them in her own body when she looked at herself.
MG: Then I would say that the sculptures are a synthesis of the archetypical mother and herself, basically because of the strong erotic element in them. The female figures seem to abandon themselves to the erotic, to a dreamy, erotic joy, given to a kind of sensual intoxication. The Great Mother from the erotic aspect is, of course, Venus, the Goddess of fertility and of the blind, the unconscious, and the animalistic Eros. In my view, Ira’s erotic, sleeping figures represent this unconscious, this nocturnal sea quality of Venus. We can name these works as “The Venus of Jaffa.”
JR: All that was inhibited and humble in her, received intense representation in her work.
MG: Another typical quality I see in her work is the existence on the border of being and non-being. The dolls seem perishable, their softness evokes anxiety and caution. Venus was born of the foam of waves, and Ira’s dolls were born of cotton made in Holon.
JR: Very well put, Motti, really. Indeed, the works can be easily destroyed, or vanish. The materials
they’re made of are very delicate – cotton and nylon stockings are not durable. Even when the sculptures include constructions of wire, they are not works of bronze or stone. The truth is, when Ira made the sculptures we did not think in terms of longevity. To a great extent, they were meant to last a short while. But, surprisingly, thirty-five years later, in spite of the poor, even catastrophic, maintenance most of them endured, these works still have a presence. They win us over with their sharp phrasing. They possess a necessary completion. A good sculpture of stone or metal can exist as a sculpture even when its arms, its nose, or head, are missing. But Ira’s sculptures cannot be broken; they can only be torn, or damaged. Soft sculptures have their own rules because of the materials used. Ira often considered sculptures without heads, or arms, but technically such sculptures were not possible.
MG: How would you define Ira’s concept of beauty?
JR: In ethnographic creations the key is the quotidian. Remember, for instance, the people dancing in a Bruegel country wedding. With Ira, the design and the materials take us to the human and the everyday without any sublimation or idealization. The works are made of perishables and they lead to smiles and
delight.
MG: Bianca Eshel Gershuni also works with perishable ready-mades, such as plastic toys, sponges, or aluminum wrappers for candy and cake. It’s a typical modernistic strategy in art to include objects devoid of any idealization, but made of simple materials of no monetary value.
JR: But Bianca’s work acquires a monumental dimension, not so Ira’s. The figures in “Wedding” and in “Hassidim” are grotesque. The female sculptures, on the other hand, have a dimension of beauty, eroticism and human warmth.
MG: If we compare Ira’s work to the Great Mother sculptures of Henry Moore, we see that his are
monumental and often menacing, while Ira’s figures dwell in a sensuality of great pleasure. They delight in the mechanism of the pleasure principle.
JR: Ira has a few works that can be considered monumental in the direction of pre-historical art, exploring the limits of soft materials. The larger the works, the larger the meanings they touch upon – it is hard to keep them in the domestic, everyday, emotional framework. In the Esther and Marc Scheps collection there is a strong, clod figure, a sort of monumental Mother Earth, whose sensual-erotic side is limited in comparison.
MG: Ira’s creations, in their materiality – nylon stockings, cotton, fabrics – and also in their shapes, express a feminine posture of yielding, of submission, edging toward the choice of amorphousness.
JR: At first, the dolls were tougher, their filling quite robust. But gradually their filling got softer and softer, and when you touch them it feels as though they’re made of air. They are beings in danger of disappearing.
MG: Like hills in the desert shaped by the wind.
JR: Or like writing in the sand to be erased by the sea.
MG: Your image is even more in line with Venus of the sea. All bodies are exposed, which adds to
their vulnerability, to their need for a protective intimacy.
JR: In my view, Ira achieved in her sculptures perfect command over the materials she used. They inhabit their matter. They do not imitate sculpting in hard materials, such as stone, wood, or metal.
MG: Another facet in the being-non-being of the dolls is the fact that many of them are sculpted in a state of slumber. They exist in dreams and in the sensuality of sleep, in the intimate protection of a place that allows one to sleep in peace, or to stretch out under the sky, exposing belly and breasts. Also in the drawings, there are sleeping women and sleeping dogs, and they look as if they’re locked in a loop created by the body of the dog. The sleeping women bring to mind Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, upon whom a wicked mother had imposed a deep slumber and so turned them into a living dead, waiting for the prince to arrive.
JR: In the sculptures of the sleeping women there’s also the sense of withdrawal and shyness. In
cotton sculptures, a static motion is fitting, a motion of non-motion. When the sculpted figure is not standing, it is easier to work with her, because the wire exits through the feet and is out of the way. When preparing for the show, handling the sleeping figures, I had to find new ways to tie them to their bases.
MG: All the technical elements strongly affect the character of the works, the erotic sensuality that they radiate, their psychic passivity, their dreaminess.
JR: Weisberg, too, by the way, painted many nudes of a reclining figure. He said it was the natural
pose for a model that you paint for 150 hours.
MG: If we are to sum up Weisberg’s work into one painting, an understandable urge because of the
likeness of his paintings, his subject also touches on the periphery of being without being—in
this “one” painting there is a figure that blends harmoniously with its background and is nearly
swallowed by it.
JR: But Ira’s figures have more of a presence in space. They have weight and a clear shape.
MG: Another element that contributes to the dolls’ liminal existence is the lack of facial features, their faces are pretty dim and indistinct. It’s as if their identity has been lost in the erotic sensuality of their body.
JR: The supposedly indistinct faces are typical to most of the dolls, because the face plays no central role in them. An overly worked face in the naked doll would have spoiled the balance of its concept and composition.
MG: I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but when you discuss Ira’s work you consistently shift between she and we, between she made and we made, between she thought, and we thought.
JR: In the beginning, we shared a studio of one room, and later, in Jaffa, we each had a studio in the same house. Together we took care of the kids, the house, the cleaning, the cooking, and everything else a life together requires. I believe I remember where I found every wire for the construction of every sculpture. They once made a movie about us, which, regrettably, I wasn’t able to find, and it ended thus: our studios were at both ends of the house, and Ira is shouting from her studio to mine: “Jan” This shout concludes the film.

* Mordechai Geldman, a clinical psychologist and a poet, is the recipient of the 2010 Bialik Prize in Poetry.

Translation: Tsipi Keller

Published in the catalog “Ira Reichwarger”, January, 2011
Curator: Jan Rauchwerger
Catalogue editor: Galia Bar Or
Museum of Art, Ein Harod