The gallery is pleased to present Shai Kremer's first solo exhibition in France. Through the two series presented, Infected Landscape and Fallen Empires, he paints a metaphorical portrait of the transformation of the Israeli landscape through years, decades and even centuries of successive civilizations.
Born in 1974 and raised in Kibbutz Gaash (Israel), Shai Kremer began his photographic work in 1999, while still a student in Tel Aviv, and continued it by obtaining his Master in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Art in New York. Since then, he has made hundreds of landscape photographs set in Israel and currently in New York City where he resides.
In his photographs from the Infected Landscape series, "some places are easily identifiable as military training areas such as 'Chicago,' a kind of fictional city that served for many years as a training camp for Israeli troops. Others are more ambiguous. Only the titles allow us to locate the places geographically and politically. Some photographs seem, at first glance, to represent bucolic and rural places like his small hills covered with lush vegetation that turn out to be, upon reading the title, a tank barrier in the Golan Heights."
In his series Fallen Empires, Shai Kremer shows how history shapes and modifies a landscape, how the different historical strata, the different periods of occupation of a place, by different civilizations (from the Egyptians to the Israelis) mark it permanently.