Yisrael Feldsott - Early Works 1974 - 1986

Description

“When I first saw Feldsott’s work, I was just astonished because I hadn’t seen anything like that before—and I’ve seen a lot! I had not seen anything quite this magical in a long long time. This is work that really made you stop in your tracks. There’s a quality of mystery and at the same time, it is beautifully executed.”

~PETER SELZ,

Former Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture MoMA/New York
Founding Director Berkeley Art Museum—Berkeley, CA

This exhibit offers a rare glimpse into the exciting early works of Feldsott, whose career as an artist living on the fringe of our culture has spanned nearly forty years. His art is a synergistic melding of ancient wisdom and his outrage at tyranny and injustice in the world. Feldsott was an early pioneer of the aesthetics of street art; creating a stylistic blend of graffiti and indigenous art; appearing ancient and yet contemporary.

In the eighties, Sandra Roos, a noted art historian in the Bay Area, said that, “Feldsott was the Matisse of the (then) emerging punk art world.” Feldsott was able to bring this controversial art form to a museum setting nearly seven years before Basquiat’s first show. Early in his career, Feldsott had the distinction of being the youngest artist to ever display his works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Feldsott seemed destined for international fame but he became disillusioned with the art world after issues of censorship and commercialism and decided to retire from publicly showing his works.

Many of his works from that time were stolen, destroyed, or cannibalized (many by the artist himself; not only as a symbolic release from the constraints of the art world, but because he perpetually needed new surfaces to continue working.) The result is a dwindling collection of these influential early works.

The paintings include Feldsott’s 1976 Hunter Series and works from the SFMOMA exhibit, The Aesthetics of Graffiti in 1978 as well as select drawings and sculptures.

The Hunter Series is group of nine primitive and guttural pieces that exist in a medium somewhere between painting and sculpture. The work has powerful energetic lines that channel Cy Twombly’s work. Peter Clothier of the Huffington Post writes: “Surfaces, dense with material in places, are worked and reworked, revealing as many layers as an archeological dig and requiring the eye to pursue the artist's arduous journey in the creation of the painting. Confronted by his paintings, we are invited to encounter the darkness and the ecstasy of our own inner life.”

The exhibit will also display Feldsott’s paintings from the SFMOMA exhibit, The Aesthetics of Graffiti. The images are alarmingly provocative and draw inspiration from The Automatic Writing Experiments of the Surrealists.

Feldsott’s Dead Men sculptures closely resemble ancient artifacts, reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet.

Also on display are Feldsott’s drawings: pastels, inks, intaglios, and monoprints that chronicle 12 years of the artist’s development, providing a visual thread that traces Feldsott’s evolution. The iconography and archetypes that define his style had their infancy in these scrawlings.

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