2015 Catalogue Archive

For his recent On Reflection series, Israeli artist Ori Gersht and his assistants spent months painstakingly creating silk flower arrangements that replicated those in Jan Breughel the Elder still-life paintings located in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The arrangements were then placed in front of glass mirrors. With a number of large format cameras, Gersht captured the explosion of the mirrors as he sent an electric charge through them. The photographs in the series are divided into three groups: Material (camera focused on the surface of the mirror), Virtual (camera focused on the flowers), and Fusion (a combination of both mirror and flower focal lengths). In this work from the Material group, the camera captures the sharp-edged shards of glass at the instant the mirror is destroyed. The reflection of the flowers is blurred due to the camera’s focal length and the vibrations of electricity running through the glass. Gersht brings the historic still-life – and its notions of beauty, fragility, temporality, and death – into the present through the use of the camera. Gersht builds on these ideas, shifting our thinking to the implications of the camera (and the mirror) as a device that conveys social values and captures life’s fleeting moments. Gersht’s work is included in numerous prestigious public collections and has been the subject of solo exhibitions worldwide.