“Beauty makes a pact with the Devil” —Vanity Fair

Ori Gersht is a conduit between the past and the present. With the latest digital technology, Gersht’s work poetically revisits sources ranging from 19th-century romantic landscape painting to the Holocaust, which imbue his work with a compelling tension between beauty and violence, memory and history. In twenty-five works, including large-scale photographs and films dating from the late 1990s to today, Gersht examines the evolving relationship between cultural, political, and art histories to shape an exhibition The New York Times describes as “beauty, tender and fleeting, amid history’s ire.”

As an extension of Gersht’s engagement with art history, he has been given full access to the MFA’s encyclopedic holdings. An integral component of the exhibition, Gersht selected works from the collection in close collaboration with curators across the Museum. The Foster Gallery will be punctuated by these works, including American paintings, Japanese prints, and vintage photography. The exhibition also features a film, Liquid Assets, that Gersht created especially for this MFA exhibition, taking as his starting point an ancient Greek coin from the collection.

“Ori Gersht: History Repeating” is the first full survey of Gersht’s work, including several photographs never before exhibited, and is accompanied by a major monograph published by the MFA.

Above: Ori Gersht, Far Off Mountains and Rivers, 2009. Lightjet print. Courtesy Angles Gallery, CRG Gallery, Mummery + Schell, and Noga Gallery. © Ori Gersht.