1905 Building

This exhibition, the first U.S. retrospective of the work of Israeli artist Moshe Kupferman, included his paintings and works on paper. Moshe Kupferman: Between Oblivion & Remembrance was organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art.

This exhibition included 58 paintings, works on paper and sketchbooks drawn from the collections of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum, as well as public and private collections in this country. Kupferman also exhibited his work in several European museums, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Musée National D’Art Moderne in Paris, and in numerous group shows throughout the United States.

Born in 1926 in eastern Poland, Kupferman was raised in a traditional Jewish family. With the outbreak of World War II, his childhood and formal schooling ended abruptly. Escaping the Nazis, his family fled east to the Soviet Union, where they were interned in work camps in Siberia and central Asia. Only the artist survived the ordeal. In 1948, he immigrated to Israel and a year later, he joined other refugees in founding a collective community called the Kibbutz Lohamei Ha-Gettaot (Kibbutz of the Ghetto Fighters).

Through shared struggle, Kipferman and his compatriots survived the war and successfully reconstructed their lives in the coastal farm country of western Galilee. During this time, Kupferman took classes from Yosef Zaritsky and Avigdor Stematsky, leaders of the “New Horizons” group of lyrical abstract painters in Israel.

Kupferman said that he used his painting as “a safety valve, a way of letting out what was inside me.” Critics have called his work lean and understated. He uses a limited number of colors in his paintings to enhance the abstractions and, as John W. Coffey writes in the catalogue that accompanies the show, the lend “a solemnity — a philosophical seriousness to the imagery.”

Exhibition Curator John Coffey and Yona Fishcer, Chief Curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, wrote essays for the show’s illustrated catalogue.

This exhibition was organized by Curator John Coffey at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.