As a child growing up in the small city of Ashdod, near Tel Aviv, Yehudit Sasportas would draw a picture at the end of the day to describe how it went.
“If it was a good day, if it was a bad day, I would make a diagram,” says Sasportas. “Nobody else could understand these diagrams, but to me they were perfectly clear.”
Today, Sasportas, 32, is gaining international attention for her beautiful and subtle artwork. Her large-scale installations, which have been exhibited in New York, London, Basel, Switzerland, and Berlin defy easy categorization, but starting this month, visitors to the Berkeley Art Musuem have a chance to get a sense of her unique talent.
Sasportas is one of a handful of artists selected this year for the museum’s celebrated Matrix program, which spotlights newcomers at the forefront of contemporary art. Trained at Israel’s most acclaimed art school, the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, Sasportas was awarded the Gottesdiener Prize as the most accomplished young artist in Israel last year.
Israel may be a small country, but Sasportas works on a grand scale. In her previous work, “The Carpenter and the Seamstress,” the floor of a room is covered with the architectural layout of her parents’ public-housing apartment, and two walls are covered with images. “By the River,” her work on display at the Berkeley Art Museum, is a grid of paintings that extends the whole length of the 75-foot gallery floor.
In this latest work, she uses familiar references from an infographic-happy culture — bar charts, graphs, maps — to create an emotional diagram. This diagram, happily, is fairly legible. Even for those who view modern art as a foreign language, her work may not need that much translation. Although she speaks mostly in abstractions (e.g., lines and forms), there’s the occasional word, like a tree or a mountain, to convey a message. According to Sasportas, “By the River” is about the different parts of a city and how they are like the pieces that make up our self-identity.
As a recognized emerging artist, Sasportas is helping to refurbish the image of a country that has been considered a backwater for modern art.
“What Israeli artists were creating was so physically separate from what was happening in the Western art world — they were about a decade behind the major art movements,” says Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Matrix curator at the Berkeley Art Museum. “That’s changed within the last 10 years. Yehudit’s work is really exceptional. There’s no one in the world making work like her.”
Visitors will get Sasportas’ distinctive viewpoint about what it means to be alive in such tumultuous times. But her work doesn’t illustrate the conflict in Israel — at least not in the overt way you’d expect from someone who now lives in Tel Aviv.
“The level of information in the media is so aggressive and so violent,” says Sasportas, whose own soft-spoken manner is belied by an intensity that comes through in her words and articulate hands. “I feel it is too vulgar and manipulative, and not the right way to do things. There is so much emotional overloading. My work is about reducing the volume to see the details.”
In one of the paintings in “By the River,” a world map is covered with an intriguing black swirl. It looks like a chart of something, but it’s unclear whether it’s showing the earth’s magnetic field or some kind of global menace. The neutral colors she uses, like pale blue and peach, don’t provide any additional clues. It’s like a Rorschach blot — you can read into it what you want.
“I really think one of her greatest achievements is the merging of the personal and political,” says Jacobson. “She addresses the situation in her home country in a completely aesthetic and non-didactic way. She’s talking about how people of seemingly irreconcilable differences can coexist. These issues are inherent in her work, although you only pick up on them after spending some time looking at it.”
Sasportas sidesteps questions about any direct references to the violence in Israel in her work, but she says living in such an extreme situation has definitely affected her. “It brings up the really profound questions: Why are you doing these things? Who needs art at such a time? “
She’s found an answer for herself. “I feel like it’s absolutely necessary, it’s answering the most existential questions to make the most un-useful thing possible, and strive for art and beauty and aesthetics. It’s trying to create order when life is not logical.”