Want to Die in Venice

Artists: Eshchar Hanoch Klingbeil
Curator: Dveer Shaked

At the exhibition “Want to Die in Venice,” Eshchar Hanoch Klingbeil, recipient of the ArtiQ scholarship for proud Israeli art (2022), presents a new body of work, of drawings featuring images of figures from classical mythology and Christianity, including the three Graces, the Muses, Medusa, and Lucifer. The works and the figures within them draw inspiration from the art of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Italian Renaissance, yet here they appear as charged visions hidden within layers of deep gray. Only deep observation and the lighting in the gallery space reveal their presence etched on the paper.

As someone who was born and raised in the Kibbutz Nir Oz, Klingbeil’s world came to a halt on October seventh 2023. The work on the exhibition, which was supposed to open last year, was paused as well. When he returned to work on it, he chose to focus on images from classical mythology – images where sublime beauty and divine power coexist alongside cruel fates and inevitable death. The exhibition space, designed in the spirit of Christian prayer and burial sites, creates both an aesthetic and spiritual experience: between exaltation and mourning, between longing for comfort and a sober look at its limitations. The adherence to beauty and the sublime in the face of an apocalyptic reality takes on a dual hue here – it is at once a hopeful tribute and a desperate gesture, where the devotion to the image is accompanied by a subtle irony and self-awareness of its limited, though still evident, power.

In the exhibition, like in the film ‘Death in Venice’ by director Luchino Visconti (Italy, 1971) which gave it its name, kitsch blends into beauty, death into art, and the tragic into the sublime, all accompanied by a veil of irony.