Jan Rauchwerger at Herzliya Museum

Of all of the works of Jan Rauchwerger (b. 1942), this exhibition, for the first time, focuses on the portraits of Galit Rauchwerger – his life partner, artist, and mother of his children (Daniel and Nadav), whom he has been painting for thirty-five years. Rauchwerger, who immigrated to Israel from Russia in 1973, won acclaim before the end of that decade, and has since exhibited numerous exhibitions in major galleries and museums in Israel and around the world. The daily painting routine that he maintains at his studio and home, somewhere between southern Tel Aviv and Jaffa, is based on observing life surrounding him yet also engages in symbolic representation. The portraits of Galit, which feature on dozens of canvases and sheets of papers in various techniques, offer a unique insight into the poetic qualities of his painterly language.

Galit’s head is surrounded by countless light-colored curls that softly dissolve her outline and illuminate their surroundings, making it difficult to precisely capture her image. The curls, and the manner in which they are painted, recall the heads of angels in the paintings of Renaissance artists such as Stephan Lochner (ca. 1410–51), or Fra Angelico (ca. 1395–1455). The very same angels also appear in Rauchwerger’s diptych The Big Orange Groves (1985) (Fig. 1) – which inspired the title of his current exhibition. These images are centered on a green orange grove, bounded by fences and cypress trees and flanked by a large round street lamp and a stray car. In this way, with a measure of humor and irony, Rauchwerger ties together the mundane with the celestial, the urban with the rural, a distant and alien culture with the local reality surrounding him, which appears as a mirage.

Galit’s portraits reflect mutual responsiveness and devotion to one another, attentiveness and a dialogic relationship – themes that largely rescue them from a restrictive binary reading of a subject–object relationship. Thanks to them, the familiar art-historical theme, “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife,” is downplayed. The portraits make reference to Rauchwerger’s abiding bond to artists of the past, but also pave an intimate and alternative path.

Together, these portraits build up like variations on a theme. Replete with empathy for the object of their gaze, they also convey piercing directness. Galit’s presence on the canvas varies from one portrait to the next, highlighting the paradox of art: on the one hand, the desire to embody dynamic life in matter and infuse it with a spiritual, all-encompassing, and eternal mystery; and, on the other, producing a personal, particular, and temporal expression of a human life.

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