Encounters - London Art Fair 2024
Curated by Pryle Behrman Encounters is a section in which two meanings of the word ‘encounter’ meet. An encounter is often unexpected, perhaps leading to the discovery of an unknown artist or, alternatively, an unexpected style or theme from a well-known artist; an encounter can also suggest a confrontation between opposing positions and artworks that challenge entrenched views and understandings.
Encounters showcases the freshest contemporary art from across the globe featuring young, up and coming galleries eager to present their emerging artists on a major platform alongside established names who are creating new and exciting work, taking their practice in a different direction, all within one of the leading London art exhibitions.
This year, Encounters expands on how an ‘encounter’ can refer to an unexpected meeting, perhaps one that leads to the discovery of an unknown artist or, alternatively, an unexpected style or subject from a well-known artist. The gallery presentations in Encounters show an exciting diversity in artistic approach, theme and geography, drawing on practices and narratives that remain underrepresented in mainstream art discourse.
Encounter, in Hebrew, can be translated in a number of ways. The context, the spontaneity, the force, the brutality, the intensity of the encounter can each be expressed with different words. The particular encounter which permeates throughout Bezalel’s work is the one most closely translated as “tryst” or the intimate encounter of two lovers. With a sense of heightened sensitivity, the artist tends to pick up on the subtle vibrations of human encounters. Love is probably the one she is the most sensitive to.
Bezalel explores love through Michelangelo’s Pietà. It is through compulsive sketching, hatching and drawing of the sculpture that she, as an artist and a woman, got to “encounter” Michelangelo. This process of reproducing such a monument of humanity, is one of personal and intimate conversation with the artist. She describes it as not only an encounter of love and respect, but one of raw intimacy. When approaching such a famous masterpiece, one comes with a certain degree of humility, but also courage. Her wholehearted intention in this work is the search for a mere glimpse of the representation of the profound love that forever binds a mother and her child. It is Mary’s left hand turned upwards in a sign of hopeless resignation that betrays the true depth of her and Michelangelo’s emotions, indeed the intensity of both their griefs. This is precisely where both artists connect, where she imaginesI her encounter with Michelangelo through the community of our suffering.
As a central piece to the display, a work entitled “Duties of the Hearts” with the Pietà as the central subject. Bezalel, uses drawing pen, pastel oil and black gesso on paper. The title refers to the primary work of the Jewish rabbi, Bahya ibn Paquda, where he emphasizes that faith is primarily and most unequivocally a matter of the heart to own and to love God. “The work, to me, is a communion of two faiths, two philosophies, two traditions around the essentiality of love.”
