Fwd: Yoram Wolberger Selected As One Of "The Top Ten Works at the Brooklyn Museum"
Thea Selby
Begin forwarded message:
From: Yoram Wolberger <yord...@gmail.com>
Date: December 27, 2018 at 11:24:40 AM PST
To: Yoram Wolberger <yord...@gmail.com>
Subject: Yoram Wolberger Selected As One Of "The Top Ten Works at the Brooklyn Museum"
I'm honored (please see below)...a nice way to end 2018. Wishing you a great New Year!!!
Mark Moore Gallery is pleased to announce that Yoram Wolberger is featured in Time Out New York's article "The Best Artworks at the Brooklyn Museum in NYC," a collection of top ten artworks from their permanent collection.
The Brooklyn Museum is Brooklyn’s premier art museum and an anchor of the borough’s cultural life. In terms of size, it’s New York City’s second largest museum with roughly 1.5 million works in its collection. That’s more than five times the size of the Museum of Modern Art’s holdings and far outstrips the 22,000 objects owned by the Whitney. And like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum’s cache of paintings, sculptures, drawings and more covers 5,000 years of art history. You can see the scope of what the Brooklyn Museum has in store with this list of 10 best works from its collection.
Yoram Wolberger
Red Indian #4 (Spearman), 2008reinforced cast fiberglass composite and pigmented resin
75 x 75 x 22 inches / Edition of 3 + 2 APs
Collection of The Brooklyn Art Museum
Yoram Wolberger uses childhood toys and everyday domestic items to create his large scale sculptures, foregrounding the latent symbolism and cultural paradigms of these objects that so subtly inform Western culture. By enlarging this ephemera to life size, Wolberger emphasizes the distortions of their original manufacture disallowing any real illusion and conceptually forcing the viewer to reconsider their meanings. When enlarged beyond any possibility of dismissal, we see that toy soldiers create lines between “Us and Them”, plastic cowboys and Indians marginalize and stereotype the Other, even wedding cake bride and groom figurines dictate our expected gender roles.
Yoram Wolberger
TROPHY #1 (Baseball), 2008
Cast and Polished Stainless Steel
78 x 36 x 36 inches (approximate dimensions)
Edition of 3 (+ 2 Artist Proofs)
Price Upon Request
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My art manipulates and challenges our perceptions of the familiar through a variety of sculptural interventions. I often choose to work with everyday, culturally iconic, objects to which we attach deep-seated and often unconscious meanings. Transformed beyond their expected context, these evolved objects suggest new associations and provoke fresh insights into their larger meaning and relevance.
For this project, I am interested in examining the contrast between the symbolic and the material dimensions of what I refer to as "common sports trophies". Specifically, these are the small silver or gold-colored figurines typically awarded in recreational baseball and football. With their idealized figures, such trophies are awarded to represent essential qualities of greatness in a participant. As cultural artifacts, however, our common baseball trophies epitomize values that are intrinsic not only to baseball, but to American society and community as well.
In the archaeology of American cultural artifacts, common sports trophies are fitting symbols of personal achievement within a democratic society. Cast from non-precious materials to shine like silver and gold, they are at once common objects and personal treasures. Originally reserved for champions, they are now often awarded to recreational players in honor of a variety of achievements other than victory, including participation.
Some purists believe such liberal distribution rewards mediocrity and dilutes our vital societal value of “playing to win”. However, I believe the ubiquity of trophies in recreational play both reflects and promotes the unique cultural values that elevate baseball from mere competitive sport to social institution. For most, after all, involvement in baseball begins casually, with family and friends in backyards and neighborhood parks, then later, softball and Little League. Welcoming people of all ages, backgrounds, colors and classes, baseball offers formative experiences of social collaboration, personal development and, for many immigrants and their families, acculturation. The culture of baseball thus nurtures many qualities essential for successful democracy, such as inclusion, community and honoring each individual as valuable. They connect societal values of teamwork, sportsmanship, effort and dedication with personal ideals of success, celebrity and fame. Many of baseball’s most celebrated heroes started with nothing: these trophies shine with the promise of the American Dream, whereby any person may, through sheer heart, rise from the dust to an elevated place of glory.
My intention is to design and construct life-size figurines, standing between 6 and 8 feet tall and meticulously replicating the smaller versions found on common Baseball trophies. Fabricated from stainless steel casts and polished to a chrome-like finish, they will magnify the humble grandeur of the familiar shiny figurines while exposing the typical casting seams, mass-production flaws and design shortcuts that normally escape our attention. Enlarged 20 times beyond their original size, the trophies’ imperfections become relevant and, it is my hope, intriguing.
For some, the sculptures will evoke personal memories of inspiring moments, achievements and lessons learned from the game. For others, they will stand as noble monuments of the American Dream. And for others still, the contrast between the figures’ idealized poses and their structural imperfections will provoke deeper contemplation of our values of competition, achievement and the risks that accompany the rise to fame.
Yoram Wolberger
Blue Cowboy #2 (Rifleman), 2008
reinforced cast fiberglass composite and pigmented resin
75 x 75 x 22 inches / Edition of 3 + 2 APsPrice Upon Request
Yoram Wolberger (b. 1963, Tel Aviv, Israel) earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute's (CA) New Genres Department. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and has been featured in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), deCordova Sculpture Park (MA), the Aldrich Contemporary Museum (CT), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Contemporary Art (IL) and the Israeli Museum of Modern Art (Israel) among others. His works have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), the Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California Riverside (CA) and the McNay Art Museum (TX). The artist lives and works in San Francisco, CA.
This week’s featured video interview is with YORAM WOLBERGER which can be viewed here:
The artist discusses his background, the development of his work, the concepts and ideas behind it, and looks at some of his most noted and acclaimed pieces.
YORAM WOLBERGER
Toy Soldier #4, (Offhand Position), 2016
3D digital scanning, CNC digital sculpting, Reinforced Fiberglass Composite, Urethane
Approximate dimensions: 72 x 60 x 24 inches / Edition: 3 + 2 A/PsPrice Upon Request
For your reference, additional images and information on the work of Yoram Wolberger can be found posted on our website at:
http://www.markmooregallery.com/artists/yoram-wolberger/
You can scroll the images on the page by using the arrows (< or >). To view an image, click on IMAGE on that webpage or on the “+” icon to enlarge it.
All Wolberger sculpture pieces are available on a commissioned basis and all works are subject to prior sale. The price on this work is subject to change without notice. Shipping, site preparation, and all installation charges would be additional.
Please call me if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Mark Moore
Mark Moore Fine Art+1.310.266.2283
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