Can Art Magazine - Museum - The Name of the Painting / David Ginton at Tel-Aviv Museum of Art

The Name of the Painting / David Ginton at Tel-Aviv Museum of Art

The exhibition spans five decades of artistic practice, from 1973 to 2020, but it is centered on the verso paintings created by David Ginton in the past twenty years. These works push the linguistic preoccupation in Ginton's oeuvre to the limit, a process which has been rooted from the very outset in 1960s and 1970s European and American conceptual art.
Since 1994, the key motif in Ginton's oeuvre has been the "back" of the painting, initially in photographs of the reverse side of paintings from the collection of Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and later, in the 2000s, in verso paintings alluding to the trompe l'oeil tradition in Western painting. These paintings depict the (alleged) backs of fictitious paintings, bearing the paintings' titles alongside texts—excerpts from theoretical essays and books about art, biblical verses, Midrashim, as well as invented texts. In presenting the text appearing on what seems to be the back side of a painting, Ginton brings the literal-conceptual aspect underlying his work to the fore. The painting's reversal is interpreted in these paintings in terms of revealment and concealment, questioning the work's elusive existence and its ability to reveal itself to the viewer, while concurrently hinting at theological aspects associated with seeing the face of God and with death.

Curator: Anat Danon Sivan
Assistant curator: Naama Bar-Or

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