Izhar Patkin 'Judenporzellan' at the Holly Solomon Gallery (172 Mercer str. New York City) May 2 - June 13 1998

The following is an exert from the press release of the gallery:

"The Holly Solomon Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new works by Izhar Patkin entitled 'Judenporzellan'. This large scale works on paper continue his exploration of narrative form. The work is executed in his trademark stenciling technique which Patkin made his own in the 1985/6 painting on rubber curtains, "The black paintings", now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. This time his technique evolves into a complex amalgam of cutting' folding, and bending of stenciled paper.

In 'Juden Porzellan', Patkin drafts portraits of three successive generations of the Mendelssohns family and stenciled imagery of various porcelain objects from teapots to figurine of apes, as characters to tell a story of faith and delusion. The Mendelssohns were one of the Jewish families in Berlin who were victims of king Frederick II's plan in 1796 to fund his inferior porcelain factory by forcing Jews to buy his low quality, overpriced products before receiving permits of any kind. Moses Mendelssohn, the patriarch who is considered the father of Jewish emancipation and advocate of equal rights and progressive thinker, involuntarily became the owner of twenty porcelain monkeys. From the mid 18th century on, the Mendelssohn clan had a critical impact on Berlin and contributed greatly to European thinking and culture. The were philosophers, authors and composers; people of enormous talent who believed that social conformity, tolerance and creative contribution to high culture could end discrimination and persecution.

Patkins imagery of porcelain, which normally would denote wealth and refinement, becomes an indelible mark of inequity passed from generation to generation. In his contemporary terms, Patkin employs the Menselssohn paradoxical legacy to raise the dilemma of creativity and politics in our own time".