Erez Israeli

Israeli's recurring subjects, according to a 2014 profile, include memory and commemoration, symbols of pain and glory, the Zionist ethos, and the Holocaust.[3] The profile characterized his treatment of Holocaust memory as breaking down a paradigm that treats "the Jewish side" and "the German side" as homogeneous groups.[3]

At an exhibition at Givon Gallery, he displayed a yellow badge and Auschwitz prisoner uniforms that he had collected as souvenirs on eBay, alongside a soup plate evoking "a Polish mother's home."[3] He also transformed wreaths of mourning and remembrance into decorative, cynical ornaments; an example was included in the permanent display at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.[3]

After receiving the Ministry of Culture's prize for a young artist, Israeli presented a work at the Haifa Museum described as a kind of Golgotha Valley, made from concrete heads and walking sticks; he had collected the walking sticks at flea markets and antique shops in Germany.[3] The profile interpreted the sticks' marks of time and personal identity as suggesting individual former owners whose stories remained unknowable.[3]

A video work by Israeli was included in Tula Amir's exhibition "Lifebuoy – A Typology of Commemoration in Israel – Architecture and Society," shown at the Henich Gallery for Architecture and Experimental Art at the Technion in Haifa.[4] Projected onto transparent Plexiglas, the video depicts a mother repeatedly trying to grasp her son's body as it slips away, while the prayer "El Male Rahamim" sounds in a distorted form that becomes a continuous growl.[4] The exhibition was a reduced-format presentation of a project originally developed for Israel's representation at the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale.[4]

In 2014, Israeli was selected through a competition involving seven artists to create a mural on the exterior of Berlin's Bethanien art center. The project was commissioned by the center's curator and director, Christoph Tanert, for the building's 40th-anniversary celebrations.[3] An international curatorial team chose his proposal, and the reported budget was €60,000.[3]

The work engaged directly with the site's history, including the brothers Leo and Felix Israel and the lighting factory they established, which operated in the building until the Nazis came to power in 1933.[3] Felix Israel fled Germany before the war, and the family name was erased from the building's facade.[3] Israeli's mural restored the name "Israel Felix" to the building's surface, but layered the large fluorescent letters until they no longer formed a legible name. The article characterized the result as both erasing and commemorating its subject.[3]

Israeli explained: "I searched for a way to deal with the memory of the past in a way that makes it present, but not directly and not by means that are generally accepted for dealing with this subject" (translated from Hebrew).[3]

By the time of a 2017 profile, Israeli had been living and working in Berlin for approximately two years.[2] He described his identity plainly: "I am still an Israeli artist living in Berlin."[2]

In 2017, the joint collection associated with Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof and Neue Nationalgalerie acquired several dozen of his works from three series he had exhibited in Germany.[2] The profile presented the acquisition as significant recognition within the German art scene and reported that the collection's director had first encountered his work at Givon Gallery in 2014.[2]

The acquired series included illustrated online jokes about the Holocaust, Germans, and queer people; works for which Israeli tattooed a Berghain club-entry stamp onto his body weekly for ten weeks and attached a camera to his arm during club visits to record from the stamp's point of view; and wooden works concerning dark rooms in clubs.[2]