LEGENDS AND LEGACIES: EVYATAR STERN
The series "Legends and Legacies" was created in the years 1998-2005. The series is comprised of 100 13cm X 13cm works of art. In this series Evyatar Stern fashions new "identification-cards", he examines and categorizes them according to their relationship to the historical process.
On the conceptual level, Evyatar probes humanistic processes, enlarges them, freezes, exposes and places them within an empowered structure. He constructs a road map to understand the delicate, complicated and almost apocalyptic texture of Israeli society, all this shaped through images relevant today in an unprecedented way. The works are symbols (badges) of the presidency of the Israeli state, the work of the "head of military operations", which took place six years ago, functions as a prophesy that has been realized in the last couple years.
In years of 1981 and 1982, Evyatar presented a series entitled "The Ideological Crematorium". This series of sculptures expressed incisive censure on the state and military establishments after the first Lebanese War. It was also a marking point in the artistic climate of the country for until now there had yet to be a considerable "coming out of the closet" of second-generation Holocaust survivors. The use of tabooed symbols of the Holocaust struck waves and the responses were harsh indeed.
Evyatar, a son of Holocaust survivors, chose from this point the mark and object that symbolizes the moral decline of the 20th century, reconstructed it, and revealed the slow transformation of the hunted into the hunter. The lessons of the Holocaust had not been absorbed by Israeli society nor assimilated into her values.
Dr. Ron Pundak wrote of his work, "Stern inquires deeply into the fundamental stratum of the paired terms "Ideological Crematorium," the ideological is erased, the Israel of here and now vanishes in the search for universal meaning and what remains is a resurfacing of apocalyptical sub-consciousness arising from artistic adaptation."
Evyatar has since presented his works in many locations, namely in Paris where he resided for 10 years, the United States and Canada. Since his return to Israel, Evyatar has exhibited on and off within the country and abroad: large scale installations (The Herzilya Museum of Modern Art, 2000), video art, as well as artworks (for walls) that are a direct continuation of his social and political messages. These years Evyatar attends to and examines the flood of myths that has structured Israeli society.
Tali Tamir wrote on the exhibition presented in Kibbutz Gallery in the late 1990's, "The visual plane of the works (layered in wax that conceals the buried text) deals in its entirety the recent history of the Zionistic ethos. (In Evyatar's works there are) created layered contacts disconnected between European sub-consciousness that continues to beat and exist beneath the surface, and the great efforts of Zionistic culture to repress and camouflage… Stern's materials are icons of Israeli society, which he scatters on a field that grows on moss.
Written by artist
Translated by Roshni Sharma