Israeli artist Ruven Kuperman opens exhibition at Kit Schulte Contemporary Art

BERLIN.- Kit Schulte Contemporary Art announces an exhibition by Israeli artist Ruven Kuperman to the Berlin audience.

In New Mythologies, Kuperman attempts to connect japanese elements of tradition and culture with a heroic contemporary imagery, based on the old and new testament.

Kuperman’s recent works on paper are large-format drawings with colored pencil, inspired by the japanese woodcuts of the Edo period, especial ly by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Kuperman searches for an opportunity to create new mythologies, which are customized to our globalized modern world. In his atmospheric drawings, heroes of japanese myths and Kabuki dancers in traditional costumes meet with Manga and Hentai characters. The woodcuts are called ‘Ukiyo-e’, in english: ‘pictures of a flowing world’, a title that is adequate for his works, in which he chooses the iconography of different times as a theme. Established boundaries start to blur and new connections between historic elements occur and remind us of European historic paintings.

Kuperman was born in 1964 in Kishenev, Russia and lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel. He received his BA in fine arts and philosophy from Haifa State University in 1989 and continued his studies in the US with an MFA Program at the School of Visual Arts, New
York. Since 1997 he works as a professor at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and the Wizo College of Design in Haifa. Kuperman’s paintings and drawings have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in various museums in Israel (the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem and the Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod, as well as in numerous gallery exhibitions throughout Israel and the US.