At 14:30 on April 22, 2017, a grand opening ceremony for Layers was held on the first and second floors of No. 3 Hall of Today Art Museum in Beijing, which was attended by Artists David Gerstein, Vice President of Microsoft Enterprise Strategy in Greater China , Danny Yamin , Curator Angela Lu, Executive Curator Florance Xia and Noga Zhang Shahar, the director of Today Art Museum Alex Gao and other guests. Layers is the first large solo exhibition of the Israeli artist David Gerstein in China and will last till May 16, 2017.
The exhibition theme “Layers” interprets this artist’s multi-layer cut-out sculpture art and symbolizes his artistic exploration process in different stages. Centered around the evolvement of his art language, the exhibition will showcase his most characteristic cut-out art to reveal the artistic creation idea and art philosophy of the artist.
David Gerstein started to explore various artistic creation forms in the 1970s. His early efforts mainly focused on figurative paintings with realistic style. These works were mostly themed on urban landscape and his experience with dark palette, while a sense of isolation and reclusion runs throughout all works in this stage.
The 1980s witnessed a transition in his artistic creation: he shifted his focus from paintings to sculpture and his works also demonstrated a change from dark to bright palette. It was in this stage that he started to attempt to break the boundary of two-dimensional paintings and three-dimensional sculptures and developed the unique “cut-out sculpture”.
As opposed to traditional sculptures, cut-out sculptures are produced by creating different images through laser-cutting on metal plates and then painting these metal plates with pigment. This form of art strikes a balance between paintings and sculptures, not only accommodating painter’s demand for color and texture, but also ensuring space depth of works to impart the features of sculptures.
These works show freedom and joy of pop art with vibrant colors, bold forms and lively strokes and reflect influence of American art trend on his art style. But he always insists on form of figurative artistic expression and extract subject matters mostly from daily life and natural landscape, such as butterfly, flower, bicycle, sports and cities.
In his subsequent artistic creation process, he constantly explored the relationship between art and the general public, and between art and popularity through easily understood art theme and form of expression, and created large public sculptures around the world to demonstrate his pursuit of public-oriented art.
As of today, David Gerstein has held over 120 solo exhibitions around the world and around 60 galleries in 25 counties have exhibited his works. His art works and public sculptures can be found throughout Europe, North America and South America. Recent years witnessed a rising popularity of “David Gerstein Art” in Asia; in particular, Momentum, the highest outdoor sculpture in Singapore, is the most widely known work.
From April 22, 2017 to May 16, 2017, Layers, the first large art museum solo exhibition of David Gerstein in China, will feature almost a hundred of cut-out metal wall sculptures created in the last decade.