Illya Gefter presents ‘The Front,’ works that raise historical questions

Ilya Gefter’s (b. 1980, Leningrad, Former Soviet Union) series of large-scale works, titled The Front (or The Banality of Evil), now exhibited at The Artists House, Tel Aviv, raises historical issues that evoke fundamental questions pertaining to morality, memory, repression, testimony, and indoctrination.

Doron J. Lurie, curator of the exhibition, has been following Gefter’s artistic development for almost 20 years. In the exhibition’s “Synopsis,” Lurie writes that after embarking on a “grand tour” of archaeological sites throughout Italy, depicting the antique, Renaissance, and Baroque art that he encountered, Gefter has now turned to “archaeological excavations” of his own, revisiting World War II.

“Quiet, calm, and peace-loving, Gefter seems to be moving back and forth between two worlds: the contemporary world (family, painting, career) and the 1940s (the period of World War II). Every morning, he goes to his studio in the heart of an industrial area in south Tel Aviv, away from the hustle and bustle, and plunges into the depths of that war. A glance at the studio reveals rather large canvases: on the right, Adolf Hitler; on the left, Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler after his suicide. In the evenings, he finishes his work, cleans his brushes, and returns to the present.”

“The subject of war has now become painfully relevant,” writes Gefter in his exhibition statement. He adds that when he started showing his first “World War II” images, he was often asked why he painted them. “Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Israel’s tragedy of October 7, 2023, I no longer hear the aforementioned question,” he confesses in the text he wrote for the opening of the one-man exhibition of his Front series of large-scale paintings.

“I hardly wished for or aimed for journalistic relevance when I started the Front series. My aspiration was to grapple with complex themes and the most meaningful questions, regardless of their timeliness. The fundamental meaning of art, I believe, is in offering a vision of harmony on the one hand and coping with a tragic absence of harmony in human existence on the other. In my paintings from the Front series, I engage with the tension between these two meta-themes.”

Lurie says that after Gefter learned where his great-grandfather was in World War II and what he did there, something in him unleashed unexpectedly. “He found himself going through family photographs from the days of the Communist-Stalinist Soviet Union and then through old books about the “Great Patriotic War,” Lurie adds. Gefter began visiting antique shops in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, seeking old photographs from that time. Gradually, he realized that it was a drive stronger than him, one that could not be ignored, and he began addressing the subject in painting.

Gefter's photos capture a reminiscent mood of World War II

Describing the photograph of his great-grandfather that inspired his involvement with World War II, Gefter writes, “The project evolved from a single photograph taken shortly after the fall of Nazi Germany. In this photo, my great-grandfather is seen standing among Soviet soldiers amid the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. A painting I made after this image to evoke the predicament of one man in June 1945 gradually evolved into a series exploring the era and its shadows. The pieces may depict some historical figures, events, and places, but they are not strictly paintings of history. Instead, the works aspire to express the human conditions that haunt us to this day, whether as memories of the past or as the results of current dramas. By exhuming experiences of a distant war, I aim to confront the darker corners of the human psyche, which can emerge at any time, wearing any uniform.”

“Painting from old photographs, Gefter ‘translates’ these old photographs for us,” writes the curator. As a translator, Gefter enlarges the photographs considerably on the canvas, abstracting the faces and other details, and thus rendering these historical photographs in a more expressionist manner.