Participants: Moshe Kupferman, Larry Abramson, Bezalel Ben Haim, Relli de Vries, Ohad Matlon, Noa Raz Melamed

“We are prisoners of our time, but also its partners and contributors. Thus it is, for better and for worse, for good and for ill. The painting canvas, for me, is a field—a field of all that accumulates, all that occurs, all that carries weight and value, insofar as I am able to perceive and bring it forth. The image is that ‘everything,’ as it is condensed in a moment of concentration, effort, and grace.

I am a painter, a witnessing and remembering painter, committed; the wondrous is not hidden from me. But no less so, hovering above me is the memory of all the horror and terror of our time. I work, and as I have already tried to say, I come to painting with everything.”

Moshe Kupferman, 1984

The exhibition Accumulated Landscapes of Time draws inspiration from Moshe Kupferman’s multilayered, memory-accumulating painting, and from his self-definition as a “witnessing and remembering painter, committed,” who brings “everything” into the act of painting—including the dread that weighs upon his time. Not the sequence of events, but the memory of terror; not the “speaking voice” that narrates and reconstructs details and scenes, but rather the tension and oppression that settle within the body, against its will.

The time is a time of war; the landscape is a landscape of destruction and ruins—in the communities along the border region and beyond it. The exhibition seeks to linger alongside landscapes of accumulated time: heaps of ruins and mounds of debris everywhere, or in the words of Heinrich Böll in 1952, “the shock and the strange silence of immense and overwhelming destruction.”

Color has drained away; the scenes are monochromatic: the black of burned ash in Be’eri and Nir Oz, the gray of debris and concrete dust in Gaza and its neighborhoods. To linger within these deserts of devastation and ruin is a moral imperative for those living in this time and place, for their colossal scale demands a new definition. The taste of dust and fragments of concrete testify to the magnitude of violence and the shockwave of revenge, as well as to the loss of countless lives, the damage to family bonds, and the erosion of human compassion. Against those who turn their heads away and close their eyes stands the gaze of the artist who sees, who refuses to erase or deny. On both sides of the border, the same questions arise: how much can be destroyed? Where will the rubble be taken? What will be done with the ruins? Where will people live? And will these sights give rise to a thought of peace?

Relli De Vries drew inspiration for the installation of rulers and curves from Moshe Kupferman’s worktable and from the array of rulers he used on a daily basis as central working tools. Trained as a landscape architect and deeply interested in measures, measurement, and spatial measuring instruments, she was captivated by the way Kupferman shifted some of the rulers into curves and bends, disrupting the rules of measurement and good order, pushing them to the brink of collapse and disintegration.

In the present installation, De Vries cast Kupferman’s curves and rulers into whitened plaster molds and encased them within wooden boxes, echoing Marcel Duchamp’s attempt to undermine the conventional system of measurement by bending a one-meter straight line (Standard Stoppages, 1913–1914). In this spirit, De Vries placed the rulers within the body of the work guided by liminal thinking and a heightened inclination toward instability. Her installation functions simultaneously as a gesture of study and homage to Moshe Kupferman, and as a fundamental commentary on the “conflicted action,” as Kupferman himself described it: one hand against the other—one supporting the ruler, the other actively drawing.