Moshe Kupferman: 50 Years on Paper
The exhibition “Moshe Kupferman: Fifty Years on Paper” marks five years since the artist’s passing and commencement of continuous activity in this house, intended to preserve, document, and disseminate his art.
The work of the mature Kupferman, from 1975 onward, manifests itself in two differentiated bodies of work: on the one hand, the “Paintings”—the generic title given to the majority of his paintings in oil (at times combined with other media) on canvas or other materials; on the other—the “Works on Paper”—a similarly generic title attached to the totality of works executed in different materials on large sheets of paper. Kupferman opted for the terms “Painting” and “Works on Paper” to emphasize what was for him a highly significant quality shared by both bodies of work: the fact that the finished work is merely a chosen station at the end of an ongoing process; it is the sum total of all the activities cumulated on the surface. Thus the work, while being a conclusion, is also an exposure: it reveals to us decisions and counter-decisions, additions and subtractions, tightening and loosening, interim conclusions which are akin to stations scattered “all along the way.”
The “work” is a true adventure. The only certainty is the whiteness of the paper. All the rest is up to you to choose and decide, and to the mediums and work modes in which you have experimented, whose efficacy you have assessed, and the likes of which you will need again, to obtain not that which you have already obtained and explored and approved, but rather that which you have not yet tried and experienced, that which you have not yet encountered. It is an adventure in stages. It progresses according to a certain order of “activities” (each activity with the “interim conclusion” and risk it introduces for the next “activity”). “The order of activities is not important,” Kupferman said in 1979. “I could have obtained a good order from others as well. My order of activities is underlain by a change of my own creation as well.”
All the “Works on Paper” were created on the work table which Kupferman built in the adjacent atelier, which was inaugurated and opened to the public simultaneous with the opening of the current exhibition. This table served him faithfully, since his return from New York in 1975, for nearly thirty years, and on it he also created many groups of small drawings.
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This exhibition does not set out to embrace the totality of Kupferman’s work on paper. We have chosen to explore its multifacetedness, delving into better and lesser known aspects. As a whole, it strives to exemplify how Kupferman, the draftsman, worked in groups, in series: this has been discernible since the sketchbooks of the mid-1960s, the introspective preparatory years of the kibbutz member, through the “Elongated Drawings” and the “Loksh” (noodle) pieces of 1976 created on leftover lithograph paper; the “Work-Table Papers” of 1977 onward; the “Populated Papers” of 1979; the “Large Megillot” and the tiny “16 Unit Groups”—both from 1987 on; and finally, it is also true of the “Cardboards” from 1994 onward. In-between, there are groups of drawings which respond to specific events, such as the drawings of the series “With Beirut—After Beirut—With Beirut,” and those in memory of Emil Grunzweig, as well as important groups of lithographs and screenprints. All these form a different chapter in the perusal of Kupferman’s work on/with paper, and have been exhibited here in the past. Works which do not explicitly belong to a “group” are the playfully folded cardboards, which call to mind models for sculptures or possibly intimate confessions, for whose making, as for his painting and drawing, Kupferman harnessed the utmost gravity alongside a fair share of humor.
Yona Fischer, July 2008
