We need a bit of time

Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas creates what she calls ‘mental landscapes’ that explore personal and collective subconscious memory through uncanny black and white natural scenes. In the diptych We need a bit of time, 2008, a dystopian landscape of marshland amassed with woodland and surrounded by looming mountains gives the effect of a peephole view of a clearing. Light and dark shades conjure a Manichean image oscillating between day and night, the idyllic and the apocalyptic, the serene and the eerie. Sasportas utilises a delicate technique of washes of watercolour overlaid with dextrously drawn details of filigree branches in ink. The subtle shades in the lighter areas are juxtaposed with more expressive and gestural inky drips in the reflected pools in the foreground. Divided into the concentric circles of an imagined magnetic field, the work hums with a bipolarity which only serves to amplify this sublime encounter with nature.

Sasportas draws stylistic inspiration from a vast repertoire of sources including landscape painting, mass media, and Far Eastern scrolls. The artist’s depictions of charred forests are often juxtaposed with abundant, flourishing backdrops, as seen in the present work. This alludes to a preoccupation with anthropocentrism and the conflicted relationship humans hold with nature. Sasportas’ work has been the subject of numerous recent solo exhibitions including at Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Germany, 2020; The Israel Museum, Israel, 2013; DA2 Domus Atrium, Spain, 2009; and the 52nd Venice Biennale where she represented her native Israel in 2007.