Explore Israeli Counter culture 1964-1975

EXHIBITION: SAT 12TH OCT – SAT 9TH NOV, MON – SAT, 12 – 6PM

WED 16TH OCT, 7:30PM: SCREENING ‘A WOMAN’S CASE’ + SHORTS

MON 4TH NOV, 7:30PM: PRESENTATION ON UNDERGROUND ISRAELI MUSIC FROM THE 60’S BY AVI PITCHON

SAT 9TH NOV, 7:30PM: SCREENING OF 3RD EYE GROUP, JORDAN BELSON, JOHN WHITNEY SHORTS + MORE TBC

Formed in the early 70’s by maverick artist Jacques Katmor, ‘The 3rd Eye Group’ established itself as the sole counter-cultural phenomena in Israel. They collectively sought, through their art, films, installations, interventions and fanzines, to challenge politics, sexuality, and identity in the specific context of Jewish Israeli society and culture which was deeply patriotic and conservative in the aftermath of the victorious 1967 Six Day War.

This retrospective exhibition focuses predominantly on Katmor’s prolific, multi-disciplinary output from 1964 to 1975. Abstract line drawings, collages and plaster etchings, automatic, monochrome maps punctuated with arcs and triangles of true primary colour, suggesting an intimate, universal geometry running through all chaos and order, occult re-imaginings of Guy Debord’s Psychogeographic guide of Paris.

Overtly sexual and violent imagery seeping from the Free Love movement onto paper and celluloid echoing Bellmer’s erotic anagrammatic bodies and André Masson’s automatic drawings. Woman as an image, manipulated, severed and “explored” with a heavy, arty, 1970’s misogynist approach.

Katmor who was born in Egypt in 1938 to a wealthy Jewish family, travelled to Switzerland and Paris, where he studied art at the Beaux Arts and was profoundly influenced by surrealism and American experimental cinema. Katmor identified with the subversion of Dadaism and the American beat movement, Lettrism and psycho-geography as conceived by the Situationists. In 1960 he immigrated to Israel where he joined the Israeli Defence Force and fought in the Six Day War, later he refused to take part in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Katmor brought with him a continental sensibility and a longing for an avant-garde, cultural relevance and a desire to lay down some foundation of modernism in an isolated country that defined itself through military supremacy and the holocaust narrative. Part Zionist, part cultured, liberal European, Katmor was driven by an urgency to unravel his own fragmented identity within the violence of this new and contradictory nation and self-liberate through drugs, sex and creation.

In 1974 after harassment and hostility from both the police and the art establishment “The 3rd Eye Group” disbanded, Katmor and his wife Anne left Israel, disillusioned, shattered dreams and failed utopia, they eventually settled in Amsterdam which in 1970s offered funding for artists, a cosmopolitan atmosphere, legal drugs and sexual liberation, there his explorative practice became more transgressive and darker, embracing a rawer punk aesthetic.

The exhibition is curated by Ori Drumer, who was a member of radical post-punk, noise band Duralex Sedlex in the 1980’s.