Uri Gershuni, an artist living and working in Tel Aviv, holds a BFA from the Department of Photography, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (1996) and an MFA from Bezalel, Tel Aviv (2008).
Valery Bikovsky was born in Siberia in 1942, and grew up in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan. A mechanical engineer by profession, in Uzbekistan he worked on large-scale construction plans. Bikovsky arrived in Israel with his family in 1991, and has worked as guard at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art for some twenty years, the last twelve at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art. While sitting behind the Pavilion's counter, he paints on the backs of Museum posters with leftover paints from the Education Department activities.
Most of Valery Bikovsky's paintings are portraits of artists who exhibited at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion and of Museum employees-as individuals or in groups sorted by occupation: curators, guides, electricians, guards, secretaries, maintenance men, security personnel, museum shop workers. The figures are surrounded by imaginary creatures, unidentifiable animals. Bikovsky offers his paintings to the depicted subjects, sometimes accompanied by poems he writes for them in Hebrew and in Russian. Recently he has been creating photographic collages, some double-sided, consisting of pages from photography and nature books.
Uri Gershuni first saw Bikovsky's work in 2010, when he participated in the group exhibition "Living Room" at the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion. Among the paintings presented here are several portraits of artists who took part in that exhibition, a group portrait of the Museum guards, Bikovsky among them, as well as a number of portraits of the late Prof. Mordechai Omer, the Museum's former director. Bikovsky, one of the "gatekeepers" of Israel's major art museum, puts the behind-the-scenes museum on paper. By means of schematic, yet highly imaginative painting, he eliminates the latent hierarchy of the art world, disrupting its pyramidal structure. The works of the outsider gatekeeper conclude the current show.