The exhibition From Nature to Myth presents a series of 12 works, between sculpture and ready-made of curved stones entangled with books, through which Avi Sperber proposes a reflection on what have constituted our cultural principles as well as on the role of nature in their foundation, by analysing the story told in chapter 3 of Genesis.
Born in 1943, graduate of the Technion- Haifa in Civil Engineering, MSc. from Northwestern University in Transportation engineering - Evanston Illinois U.S.A. and study at AVNI institute of Art and Design- Tel Aviv, Avi Sperber has been developing a sculptural work for more than 30 years, oscillating between monumentality and reduced formats, which he regularly puts into dialogue. His work unfolds around a powerful symbolism that feeds on the cultural contexts that the artist invests.
It is through the observation of nature, through the fear and wonders it provokes, through the infinite mysteries it contains, that myths, ancestral stories or religions have emerged in all cultures.
Chapter 3 of Genesis, the origin story for monotheistic religions, relates the temptation of knowledge by Eve and Adam and their eviction from Paradise. For Avi Sperber, «it describes the birth of the human being driven by a relentless desire for knowledge. The story is an allegorical fusion of characters and processes that represent various components of human life, which have been interpreted over the generations by many people in different ways and have led to the beliefs that affect our lives to this day”.
From this chapter the artist transports out various themes in his works, such as domination, suffering, identity, the birth of language, work and finitude.
As much as the final works, the materials used carry symbols. The use of stones in these sculptures is a metaphor for the first attempts of human beings to inscribe their thoughts, the materialization of communication, languages and of writing. Stones are also associated with the celestial sphere or evoke the idea of eternity. They often symbolise the passage from this life to the next. For the artist they are also a language within a language. Through them he tries to translate concepts from his interpretation of the story into our contemporary and future histories.
The book, a civilizational symbol, is confronted today with its dematerialization. In this work, Avi Sperber used volumes from the Hebrew Encyclopaedia, a complete encyclopaedia in Hebrew, which was published at the time of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. «Today, with the development of technology and the enormous amount of information available on the Internet, it has almost no use, and its volumes are sent for recycling, so it represents the ephemeral object - man.» AS
By associating stones with books, Avi Sperber invites us to connect the present with the past, and seeks to produce an image of the continuity of events in the history of human civilization.
Margalit Berriet - Marie-Cécile Berdaguer - curaors of the exhibition
In collaboration with Doron Polak curator of - Avi Sperber : From Eternal Life to Life and Death - Septembre 2021 at Artist Museum, Givatayim - Israël