BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.75 x 11.75 in. / 256 pgs / 130 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 9/30/2012
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 82

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780878467792 TRADE
List Price: $60.00 CAD $79.00 GBP £53.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
WORLD

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

Boston, MA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 8/28/12-01/06/13

"The sumptuous vase full of flowers against a dark background, composed by Ori Gersht, could momentarily be mistaken for an old master painting. He modeled his arrangement, displayed on a video monitor deceptively framed as a painting, after an 18th-century still life by Jan van Huysum. Keep watching, though, and smoke slowly starts to billow from the flowers as a siren sound builds to an operatic crescendo. An explosion then blows glass and petals and smoke across the picture plane in all directions. Jewel-like shards fall in a silent slow-motion cascade, protracted and meditative, before the piece, titled "Big Bang," loops back to the beginning in an endless cycle. "

-Hilarie M. Sheets, The New York Times

MFA PUBLICATIONS, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

Ori Gersht: History Repeating

Text by Al Miner, Yoav Rinon. Interview by Ronni Baer.

History Repeating is the first comprehensive survey of the Israeli-born photographer and video artist Ori Gersht (born 1967). This richly illustrated book presents the best of Gersht’s achingly beautiful images, and explores how he intertwines spectacles of painterly and narrative imagery with personal and collective memory, metaphysical journeys, contextualized spaces and the history of art and photography. Be it in the scars left on the sunlit yet war-torn buildings in Sarajevo, the white noise of his train journey to Auschwitz, or the clearing of trees in a forest that once stood witness to mass murder in Ukraine, Gersht’s vision bridges a history that is full of violent horror and a world of emergent, transcendent beauty. From the radiant optical glow of pollution in the atmosphere to his freeze-frame shots of shattering floral arrangements frozen by liquid nitrogen, Gersht’s calm is one that comes after the storm. In his 2010 series of Japanese landscapes, the ghostly visual static of cherry-blossom petals echo the militarism and sacrificed youth of World War II and the more recent nuclear fallout of Fukushima, but in their own extreme transience, they also manage to embody the possibility of spiritual renewal. History Repeating demonstrates the thin line between beauty and brutality and the sublime draftsmanship behind history’s various traumatic scars. History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as unexpected beauty.

Featured image is reproduced from Ori Gersht: History Repeating.

PRAISE AND REVIEWS

Time

reinventing classic still lifes for the modern era

The Photobook Review

The elegant design, including a gorgeous silver-silk case and belly-band treatment for the cover, and the careful sequencing of the plate sections, which are printed on a different paper stock and are thoughtfully balanced alongside the essay texts, elevate this book from a typical exhibition catalog to a compelling presentation of an artist's work in book form. It handles the transition between film, painting, and photography commendably well.

Photograph Magazine

Edie Bresler

It is a lyrical plea to hold tight to memories that are already slipping away.

STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/26/2012

Ori Gersht: History Repeating Reviewed in The New York Times

The Israeli artist Ori Gersht's first museum survey opens Tuesday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hilarie M. Sheets reviews the show in today's New York Times.
continue to blog

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