![\"Anna](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/719702.jpeg\"\/)
Anna Ticho roamed far and wide across the countryside near Jerusalem for inspiration. (credit: Anna Ticho, Israel Museum)<\/p>\nMother Nature and Jerusalem are central to the exhibition Taking in the View, which opened at Ticho House on May 1.<\/p>\n
No surprises there, considering Anna Ticho\u2019s bucolic-themed collection, which predominantly feeds off the undulating landscapes and flora around the capital.<\/p>\n
For this presentational venture, exhibition curator Gilad Reich and Ticho House senior curator Timna Seligman have gone for left-field domains in addressing Ticho\u2019s prized and ever-popular body of work, and how she perceived her natural surroundings.<\/p>\n
\u201cTaking in the View features creations by five contemporary artists \u2013 all recent additions to the Israel Museum artwork inventory \u2013 that interrelate with the host painter and expound on her core aesthetics and ethos. They also take the base sentiments far beyond Ticho\u2019s creative purview, bringing it into the realms of 21st-century perception and dynamics.<\/p>\n
The exhibition might also serve to pave the way to Ticho\u2019s oeuvre for younger generations of arts consumers who may very well consider her watercolors a little too far to the romanticized parochial side for their liking.<\/p>\n
Anna Ticho roamed far and wide across the countryside near Jerusalem for inspiration. (credit: Anna Ticho, Israel Museum)<\/p>\n
Rerich allowed himself plenty of room for curatorial maneuver, unfurling a multifarious sounding board of diverse photographic voices and artistic and cultural perspectives around the permanent offerings.<\/p>\n
Realism sits alongside abstract-leaning efforts, such as an intriguing print by Beersheba-born Paris-based Raphael Y. Herman called Perspeciuum. That and Ora Lev\u2019s The Way It Was series, in fact, cross the red line into the disciplinary unknown, intentionally and purposefully eschewing fundamental principles of the photographic rulebook.<\/p>\n
For his 2022 exhibition at the munificently appointed 18th-century Baroque-style Palazzo Sant\u2019elia, in Palermo, Italy, Herman chose to hold the official opening at night, thereby seamlessly transporting the viewers to similar conditions to those in which the works were captured.<\/p>\n
Ticho House, on the other hand, is an old Jerusalem edifice with high ceilings that admit an abundance of natural light during the day, amplified by the typically whitewashed walls.<\/p>\n
Reich and Seligman, however, placed Perspeciuum in one of the inner display spaces where there is no direct solar illumination, and the artificial lighting is way down on the wattage scale.<\/p>\n
That has two principal effects.<\/p>\n
First, it resonates something similar to Herman\u2019s favored creative setting.<\/p>\n
Second, the insubstantial radiance forces one to make an effort to discern the detail of the outsized print which, at first glance, appears to be a uniformly dull amorphous stretch that offers little in the way of interest or surprise.<\/p>\n
But as your eyes recalibrate to the miserly lighting level, you begin to decipher some finer details, such as reddish spots that crop up here, there, and everywhere across the paper, amid the random dispersal of the somewhat grainy components of the seemingly vague scene.<\/p>\n
![\"\uf080](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/719705.jpeg\"\/)
\uf080 Reality gets a hi-tech twist in Noa Ben-Nun Melamed\u2019s work. (credit: ARTISTS MENTIONED)<\/p>\n
\u201cHe takes his pictures in complete darkness,\u201d Reich drops on me. \u201cHe goes out into nature. For this shot, it was the Gaza<\/a> border area for Red in the South,\u201d he adds, referencing the annual spring event which draws thousands of Israelis southward to catch the splendiferous display of anemones in the countryside. \u201cHe looks for a suitable spot, places the camera there, and then sets it to long exposure.\u201d Long is an understatement here. \u201cHe leaves the shutter open for a full night, eight hours,\u201d Reich continues.<\/p>\n There\u2019s nothing like just letting a work of art do the business for you. All you have to do is just not get in the way of the naturally evolving creative process.<\/p>\n \u201cRaphael goes to sleep in a sleeping bag there. What he gets in the morning is actually the result of light pollution in the air which is captured by the camera during the course of the night.\u201d<\/p>\n This is a prime example of laissez-faire, of getting your creative and emotional house in order before you set out on your odyssey du jour, and trusting that the ensuing continuum will lead to a worthwhile bottom line. That requires both great courage and a keen sense of what might be in the offing as things pan out as per their wont \u2013 a willingness to go with the flow, which should be an integral part of the toolbox of any artist <\/a>worth his salt.<\/p>\n The pictorial upshot takes some absorbing, but as you gradually allow the visual white noise to dissipate, you begin to pick out the spectral red dots and other forms, as it were, emerging from the eddying mists. \u201cYou start to see more things. I didn\u2019t, at first, notice the trees,\u201d says Reich. \u201cIt is a very special technique.\u201d<\/p>\n It is, indeed, a work worth waiting on. But, at the end of the day, Taking in the View is fueled by the way Anna Ticho perceived the lay of the topographical and natural land around her, and how she conveyed that through her artistic prism.<\/p>\n But, I pressed Reich, how does Perspeciuum fit in with all of that?<\/p>\n Reich feels it boils down to reimagining and refashioning. \u201cThis is about deconstruction. It is a different way of looking at the view, of looking at a familiar view which becomes unfamiliar. If we were to look at this in Herman\u2019s work, and any of the new works here, it is a matter of going through a process of practice. You need to do that in order to try to decipher what is in front of you.\u201d<\/p>\n That also serves to draw the museum or gallery visitors into the thick of the creative action, and gets them to spend time with the exhibit in question. That has to be good for both the artist and the culture consumer who has come along to get some kind of handle on the display offering, and the undercurrents to the artists\u2019 way of doing their thing.<\/p>\n The most surprising element of the layered exhibition is the spread of diminutive snapshots taken by Ticho herself. Okay, so Ticho, who died in 1980 and the age of 85, took them \u2013 in the 1970s \u2013 as part of the preparatory lead-up to taking up her palette, mixing the base hues, and placing paintbrush on canvas. Even so, who knew that the celebrated painter even owned a camera, let alone took it with her as she roamed the terrain around the capital in search of a suitable location and\/or aesthetically pleasing item of flora to portray in her own inimitable, romantically leaning style?<\/p>\n \u201cThere are places she went back to again and again, and snapped them several times,\u201d Reich advises, adding that he also wasn\u2019t aware of Ticho\u2019s photographic exploits until recently. \u201cIt is a wonderful discovery.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is really interesting is the great contradiction between her photographs and her paintings. She looks at her snaps and, ultimately, she takes something completely different from them into her painting,\u201d says Reich in a reprise of the deconstruction thread he says runs through the exhibition.<\/p>\n ‘Photographs are almost like conceptual art of the 1970s’<\/p>\n \u201cHer painting, you could say, has a romantic style, but her photographs are almost like conceptual art of the 1970s,\u201d the curator tells me as we gaze at a dozen somewhat faded, sepia-tinged, polychromic photos. He then takes me around to the obverse side of the framed set, which features just two black-and-white prints. They proffer a sharp change of observational approach. \u201cThis is entirely different,\u201d he states. \u201cIt\u2019s monochrome. You would have never thought this was something Anna Ticho photographed.\u201d<\/p>\n One frame has a buttressed wall top in the foreground, possibly a section of the Old City<\/a> wall on the side of Zion Gate, with barren-looking, sparsely populated hills behind. The other has a skeletal piece of vegetation, clearly desiccated by the unforgiving Middle Eastern<\/a> summer sun, with a similarly arid stretch of land behind. They are a far cry from the fetchingly hued pastoral subject matter one generally encounters in Ticho\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n Extra-contextual fare abounds across the whole show. Noa Ben-Nun Melamed is another exhibitor who went the left-field way in addressing Ticho\u2019s oeuvre.<\/p>\n \u201cAll the new acquisitions look at the view but suggest a new way of looking at it, of portraying it or seeing it,\u201d says Reich. \u201cThe landscape is local, but they give it a twist.\u201d<\/p>\n Ben-Nun Melamed certainly ventures into patently non-Ticho territory, both in her technological modus operandi and, by definition, in terms of the visual end result.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Noa it is difficult to discern that there is a local landscape in there,\u201d the curator posits. \u201cShe photographs a scene, and then introduces digital intervention. You no longer know what landscape it is, or where it is.\u201d<\/p>\n It may not even be from the environs of Jerusalem, thereby taking the Ticho line and running with it into aesthetic and philosophical quarters Anna Ticho could probably not even imagine, let alone incorporate in her own work.<\/p>\n The contextual waters are further muddied by the fact that Ben-Nun Melamed\u2019s contributions originate from various series dating between 2011 and 2020.<\/p>\n The artist traverses broad conceptual ground, taking herself and her viewer along fantastical channels that raise questions about real and imaginary views. If one of the base attributes of art is to pose questions about \u201creality\u201d as we perceive it, and get us to ponder what we see around us, Ben-Nun Melamed\u2019s technologically refashioned works achieve that with room to spare.<\/p>\n The same could be said of Ora Lev\u2019s slot in the exhibition, taken from her The Way It Was series, which dates to 2017-2018. However, Lev addresses the Taking in the View deconstruction conceptual leitmotif from the opposite end of the technological timeline, opting for an old-school means for producing her images.<\/p>\n Her works look like she took a bunch of flowers and put them through a full-color X-ray machine. But, in fact, she employed a far simpler, hands-on technique to achieve the captivating effect. She went for a photogram camera-less process, using glass plates and light-sensitive backdrops that produce a silhouette of the object in question, in this case flowers and other vegetation. The long exposure element integral to the time-honored technique brings out the details of the object, almost to the point of hyperrealism.<\/p>\n \u201cI learned this from an exercise our teacher gave us to do when I was in my first year of [college] studies,\u201d Lev recalls. \u201cIt is a sort of blueprint effect.\u201d<\/p>\n It also inverts the actual colors of the \u2013 in this case \u2013 flower so that the viewer ends up with a distilled flipside rendition of the subject. That resonates with the basic component of the artistic process, the relationship between corporeal reality and its presentation in the chosen artistic verbiage.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get an image similar to what you see when you look at something through a microscope,\u201d Lev notes. \u201cIt is a kind of research method.\u201d<\/p>\n Again, that suits the analytical deconstructive ethos of the exhibition.<\/p>\n And, as there is a throwback spirit to the whole Ticho-fueled project, the nostalgia berth occupied by Dorian Gottlieb seems to be a welcome given. Anyone who took the old train route to Jerusalem, which sped its way across the plains between Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh before the train began to huff and puff as it wended its meandering way through the Jerusalem Hills, should revel in Romanian-born Gottlieb\u2019s If You Loved Me and If video work from 2018.<\/p>\n The camera offers a tantalizing view through a train car window as the seasonally verdant landscape flickers across the plate glass. There is also a tangential dimension to the filmic rollout as objects, such as trees, bushes, the odd abandoned stone structure, wall, or pathway, ebb and flow as per their proximity to the train tracks.<\/p>\n This is not just a trip down memory lane, albeit a moving one for many of us, particularly those who remember a previous version of the transport mode with hard, uncomfortable wooden benches and, in pre-air-conditioning days, windows wide open to the elements, through which you surreptitiously stretch out a hand and touch tree branches at the junctures where the train slowed down to make it round a particularly sharp turn.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are the landscapes Anna Ticho saw herself,\u201d Gottlieb pertinently notes, who brings another Ticho-related element into sharp focus. \u201cThe landscape moves towards us and away from us. I can\u2019t control that \u2013 a bit like the watercolors Anna Ticho used.\u201d<\/p>\n The new acquisitions also include a diptych by Ella Littwitz titled Edith who, in some sources, is identified with Lot\u2019s wife. The biblical character who, we are told, was turned into a pillar of salt when she defied the divine prohibition and looked back at the destruction of Sodom near the Dead Sea, is portrayed as identical twins, based on 3D scans of the rock outcrop. That suggests a reflective view of life, while also keeping at least one eye firmly trained on the way ahead.<\/p>\n One presumes Anna Ticho would have gone along with that well-balanced approach to life and art.\uf06e<\/p>\n Taking in the View closes November 1. For more information: www.imj.org.il\/en\/exhibitions\/taking-view<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mother Nature and Jerusalem are central to the exhibition Taking in the View, which opened at Ticho House…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":632816,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1029,228,226,227,690,263320,229,88,803,66462],"class_list":["post-632815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-culture","tag-culture-in-israel","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-israel","tag-jerusalem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/632816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\uf080](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/719706.jpeg\"\/)
\uf080 Reality gets a hi-tech twist in Noa Ben-Nun Melamed\u2019s work. (credit: ARTISTS MENTIONED)<\/p>\n![\"Romanian-born](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/719707.jpeg\"\/)
Romanian-born Dorian Gottlieb\u2019s video work \u2018If You Loved Me and If\u2019 offers a nostalgic trip back to the landscapes Anna Ticho roamed near Jerusalem. (credit: BARRY DAVIS)<\/p>\n