Ori Gersht

Ori Gersht (; born 1967) is an Israeli fine art photographer. He is a professor of photography at the University for the Creative Arts in Rochester, Kent, England.

Biography Ori Gersht was born in Tel Aviv. He graduated in Photography, Film and Video from University of Westminster, London and studied for an M.A. in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London.

Art career Gersht has exhibited widely in museums and galleries since the early 1990s. He is represented by Angles Gallery in Los Angeles, CRG Gallery in New York, Ben Brown Fine Arts in London, and Noga Gallery in Tel Aviv. In 2012, Gersht's show History Repeating was mounted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Artistic themes Gersht engages the themes of life, death, violence, and beauty. His photographs and films transcribe images of sites of historical significance—the Judean Desert, Sarajevo, Auschwitz, the Galicia region of Ukraine, the Lister Route in the Pyrenees (on which Walter Benjamin made his ill-fated exodus from Nazi-occupied France)—into ciphers of psychological disruption. Such scenes may not seem out of the ordinary unto themselves, but, through the artist’s focused attention and treatment they evoke the emotional resonance of what has transpired—most often, violence, and, more significantly, the ghosts of war’s most egregious detritus, its refugees. Pervasive in Gersht’s work is the landscape, as a place, an idea, and an art historical trope. His films and photographs may be compared to paintings in their display, from their unhindered access (no Plexiglas separates their surfaces from the viewer) to the frames surrounding the monitors on which the films often play. Moreover, the vistas and horizons of, for instance, "Between Places" (1998–2000), "White Noise" (1999–2000), "The Clearing/Liquidation" (2005), and "Evaders" (2009), recall Romantic depictions of the sublime. They conjure precedents in both photography, such as the vistas of Andreas Gursky and the landscapes of the American South by Sally Mann, and painting, by J .M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and even Mark Rothko.

In his still life series, Gersht investigated the relationships between photography, technology, and optical perception, at a pivotal moment in the history of photography where digital technology both threatens a crisis and promises a breakthrough. Research into the early history of the medium of photography is brought together with theoretical discourse, creating still images and films that (literally) explode the genre of still life, the beautiful and destructive results captured using cutting-edge technology. In "Pomegranate", a film that references Juan Sanchez Cotan’s 17th-century still life and Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photography, a high velocity bullet flies across the frame in slow motion and obliterates a suspended pomegranate fruit, bursting it open and wheeling it slowly into the air like a smashed violated mouth spraying seeds. A peaceful image is transformed into bloodshed, and a dialogue is established between stillness and motion, peace and violence.

Gersht’s photographs and films provide a meditation on life, loss, destiny, and chance. Allusions to the violence of the French Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the suicide bombs that Gersht anticipated during his childhood in Israel can be found in his work.

Awards and recognitions 1990 South Bank Photo Show, London 1993 Department of Transport Art Competition, London 1997 Residency at Whitefield School, Barnet 2000 The Constantiner Photographer Award for an Israeli Artist, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv 2002 Consultant to the Architectural Development Planning of the South London Gallery 2004 First Prize winner, Onfuri International, Tirana, Albania

Solo exhibitions 2014 - Ori Gersht: Still Life, Columbus Museum of Art, USA 2014 - Ori Gersht: Portraits, Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, USA 2014 - All Will Come To Pass, The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel 2012 - History Repeating, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA. 2012 - This Storm is What We Call Progress, Imperial War Museum, London. 2011 - Lost in Time, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California, USA 2009 - Black Box, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, USA 2008 - Selected Films, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, USA 2008 - The Forest, Musée d’Art de Toulon, Toulon, France 2008 - Pomegranate, The Jewish Museum, New York 2007 - Time After Time: Exploding Flowers & Other Matters, The Armory Show (with CRG Gallery), New York, USA 2007 - The Forest & Blow Up, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA 2006 - The Forest, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel 2006 - The Clearing, The Photographers' Gallery, London, UK 2004 - History in the Making, Photo España, Madrid, Spain 2002 - Afterglow, Art Now Room, Tate Britain, London, UK 2002 - Afterglow, Helena Rubenstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel

Group exhibitions 2012 - Seduced by Art, National Gallery, London 2011 - Evaders & Falling Bird, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel 2011 - When a Painting Moves… Something Must be Rotten, The Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway 2011 - Eating Art, Casa Milà, Barcelona, Spain 2010 - Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA 2010 - Still / Moving, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem 2010 - Beijing International Art Biennale 2010, National At Museum, Beijing, China 2010 - Atlantis II, Rohkunstbau, Berlin, Germany 2010 - Paysage, Musée d’Art, Toulon, France 2009 - Hugging and Wrestling: Contemporary Israeli Photography and Video, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, USA 2009 - Flower Power, Villa Giulia – Centro Ricerca Arte Attuale, Turin, Italy 2009 - Cuando una pintura se mueve... algo debe estar podrido!, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico , San Juan, Puerto Rico 2008 - Pomegranate: The Jewish Museum, New York, USA 2008 - Mutation II, Paris, Kulturprojekte, Berlin, Fotofo, Bratislave, Vladmir Und Estragon, Vienna, Association Café Crème, Luxembourg, Musee de la Photographie, Moscou, Zone Attive, Rome 2007 - Video Killed the Painting Star, Museum of Salamanca, Spain 2007 - In Focus: Living History, Tate Modern, London 2007 - Single Shot, Tate Britain, London 2007 - 1st Architecture, Art and Landscape Biennial of the Canaries, Canary Islands, Spain 2006 - Inside-Out: Contemporary Artists from Israel, Museum MARCO, Vigo, Spain 2006 - Forest Primeval, MOCA (GA), Atlanta, USA 2006 - Twillight: Photography in the Magic Hour, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 2005 - Dreams and Trauma, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany 2003 - One Ground, California Museum of Photography, Riverside, USA 2002 - Reality Check: Recent Developments in British Photography and Video, curated by Kate Bush and Brett Rogers, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic 2002 - Non-Places, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, Germany