Taming Tension and Handling with Care
Ofer Grunwald is one to handle things with care. As someone who is most happy working with their hands, every medium, material, or substance is something to be treated, embraced, and explored for Ofer Grunwald. The Jerusalem-based artist specializes in cross-disciplinary sculpture, with a particular emphasis in bonsai work and ceramics. From natural materials to stone to newly invented media, Grunwald is always focused on working with the individual matter at hand. Often this involves navigating the tensions involved in sculpting individual forms which coordinate with outside issues of personal identity and history. The physical and the emotional intersect all throughout Grunwald’s work, which is why both are consistently treated with such refined attention by the artist. It takes more than immense sculpting talent to tame and mold the tangible world to expose unseen vulnerability and strain. Ofer Grunwald has the tools and the understanding needed to guide these types of contradictions to states of balance and harmony, which never fail to strike their audience deeply.
Part One: Who is Ofer Grunwald?
Question #1: Who are you?
I am a self-taught multidisciplinary artist born in Israel and raised in the 1980s. I grew up on a farm, in a family with very urban sensibilities; I was always extremely nerdy, but very proficient at sports; I am intellectually-oriented, but am happiest working with my hands; I am a loner who avidly enjoys the company of others. These contrasts – both complementary and contradictory – continue to define me today, drive me, and tend to show up in my work in sometimes surprising ways.
Question #2: Who are you as an artist?
As an artist, I started out in bonsai, where I built an international practice that continues to this day. Bonsai, and its tremendous conceptual and technical depths continues to inform my work, as does my fascination with processes and with inherent contrasts – between dynamic and static; between digital and physical; and between the opportunities and limitations of each medium. This fascination yields a body of work which tends to be filled with tension, but which (I hope) is compassionate towards its subject matter.
Question #3: What do you think about while creating?
I work with a specific result in mind, after I’ve thought extensively about what I want the piece to be. Usually, when I finally get to working on a piece, I tend to be focused on the work itself, and its forms, shapes, flow, and feel. I focus more on how I am experiencing the emerging piece through physical senses, and less on the conceptual aspect of it.
I’d say that, when I’m working, it’s the only time I can actually get my mind to shut up!
Question #4: What is something you wish someone had told you at some point in your life?
Document your work!
…well they did tell me that. Lots of times…
Question #5: Why do you need art your life?
It’s a means of communication that allows you to make really deep profound connections, and communicate who you are and how you experience the world in a more comprehensive way than words would every allow. Art may not be a very efficient method of communication, but it can be a very effective and powerful one.
Question #6: Is your artwork for yourself or for others?
I would tend to say that my artwork is mainly for myself. It is very much about my thoughts and viewpoints. However, I hope that my work also has a strong sense of reaching out to the other person, of longing to engage with them and communicate on a deeper level.
Question #7: What is your escape?
As I said – I’m happiest when my hands are working!
How would you describe your artistic practice?
My practice would best be described as cross-disciplinary, as it is not focused on any one specific medium. Bonsai and ceramic figures are definitely recurring themes, but they are heavily influenced by my excursions into other media.
I tend to use dynamic and random elements in my work (from living materials, to mechanical components), work with semi-transparent or non-solid materials that play with the viewer’s perception, or use aesthetics or techniques common to one medium when working with another. The resulting body of work is a bit hard to pin down due to its extremly broad and varied nature, but I would say that (broadly) it deals either with cultural and identity-related tensions, or tensions that arise from each individual medium’s strengths and limitations for expression.
Trees are characterized by continuous but imperceptible change. While appearing solid, they are constantly shifting from one shape to another as the seasons and years go by. The work tries to capture and make visible this ever-changing, fluid nature, by following 20 years of a bonsai tree’s development. The tree was sampled at twice-annual intervals, and rendered in almost transparent acrylic glass. As one moves around the sculpture, each angle creates its own effect, with layers stretching out or collapsing behind each other. The result is a sense of motion-blur – the sculpture constantly appears out of focus, even though each layer is completely static and sharp. In this blur, it evokes the hidden motion that we sense in trees.
This sculpture takes its visual cue from the aesthetics of 3D-printed objects, which come out of the printer with numerous supports. Usually these are removed and any hint of their presence is meticulously erased, but in this sculpture they are the main focal point.
The sculpture is part of an ongoing series of works exploring the relations, similarities, and differences between traditional craft and new craft. It takes its cue from either digital aesthetics, but recreated in strictly traditional materials and analog methods, or traditional aesthetics, but recreated in new materials and digital means. Actions which may be simple and straightforward in one method, are often extremely complex and intricate when translated into the other, thus highlighting the advantages, disadvantages, and different mindsets inherent in each respective medium.
Inspired by contemporary Aboriginal paintings, My Mothers’ Country relates the myths of my own ancestral lands – from the streets of Frankfurt, to the fields of Israel. The paintings are carried out in a similar pointillist technique, but rendered in fungal mycelium (mushroom roots), making them living, dynamic objects.
If these living paintings are to remain white, they must be kept in strictly controlled conditions – exposure to sunlight would turn them brown; exposure to air may contaminate them with foreign cultures. As such, the work becomes a dynamic installation, on whose future visitors have a direct and unpredictable influence.
It is precisely this fluidity, this ability to experience the work in different ways and on different levels that facilitates the nuanced discussion that the work seeks to evoke. By rendering the statement of the work through the dynamic medium itself, this statement remains unspoken and open to interpretation based on each viewer’s own experience and viewpoint.
This piece focuses on the visual similarity between bonsai wires, used to direct and shape the branches, and the leather bands of the Jewish tefillin, wrapped around one’s body. The piece explores various aspects of similarity between these worlds, and deals with the boundaries and intersections of discipline and beauty.
This portrait uses the temperamental, random nature of smoke to breath life into the sculpture. The contrast between the soft, buttery skin tones, the depth in the areas that were more heavily smoked, and the pensive (almost wistful) expression is fitting for a piece that obtained its character through trial by fire.
| Where/ How can Vacant Museum viewers see more of your work and where can they purchase it? |
| Past works and projects can be found on my website – http://www.ofergrunwald.com My upcoming shows include Internet of Things, a solo show that will be opening at Barbur Gallery in Jerusalem in late August 2021; and a solo show that will open in the BROEI design space in Gent, Belgium in October 2021. I am currently without representation, but anyone interested in my work can (and should!) reach out through my website or by email. |