Eran Shakine
A Muslim, a Christian and a Jew
Nicole Gnesa is very proud to present works from the series 'A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew' by Eran Shakine (*1962 Tel Aviv) from November 9 to December 16, 2023.
Laughter has nowadays become a political adventure, quite often with an open end. The times are apparently too serious, reality remains too volatile. By striving to do everything right, by wanting to please everyone, humor has gone astray, especially and although we need it now in particular, in art too. Can one today—modifying Adorno’s famous dictum from 1949 1—after Auschwitz, after all the devasting events of today still ‘laugh’?
The Israeli artist Eran Shakine (*1962), himself the child of Holocaust survivors, persistently titles each one of his drawings with the same phrase, “a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew,” almost as though he wanted to begin telling a joke. Eran Shakine represents the figures of the three world religions as “identical triplets,” letting them wander through his visual universe as indistinguishable personifications. The headline of a (fictional) drawn cover of the Times announces a “Mother gives birth to identical triplets: a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew.” But only the artist’s title indicates that these are religious characters. The linguistic markers, not the figurative depiction, are what transmit the information of religious affiliation. In their indistinguishability the three figures appear abstract, not just in the sense that one can stand for the other, but also that separations between them are fundamentally erased. Later, the three gentlemen, usually in top hats and black suits, roam all over the world: wandering through the human cultures in this world or flying beyond the world’s boundaries into the hereafter. In his drawings Eran Shakine seems to explore God and the entire world.
München
| Galerie Nicole Gnesa
11-09-2023 - 12-16-2023