In 2015 Outset Israel supported a work by Tomer Sapir for the group show Agro-Artat the Petach Tikva Museum of Art. Agro-Art explores the Israeli-Zionist agricultural ethos from the perspective of the 2000s, reflecting its changing status in recent decades. Israeli agriculture is measured not only in terms of landscape, food, and ecology; it is intricately and profoundly infused with ideology.
The installation of artist Tomer Sapir Mother of All Wheat, supported by Outset Israel, was constructed as a cross between a greenhouse, a bunker for seed preservation, and a biological research lab; it simulates a vegetal gene pool which (metaphorically) preserves the ‘evolutionary intelligence’ assimilated in the grain over millennia of agriculture.
Tomer Sapir operates in an evolutionary range whose limits he himself sets, based on the architecture of the mother of wheat: an ancient, durable plant discovered in the area of Rosh Pina by agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn (1906), regarded as a genetic point of origin from which mutations crucial to the nutrition of Western man have developed. From this archetype Sapir generates artificial mutations, invents unknown configurations, mixes three-dimensional prints with manual work, and juxtaposes the organic source with synthetic details to create a broad spectrum of variations.
TOMER SAPIR was born in 1977 in Israel. In 2009 he received an MFA at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. His work has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Israel and abroad, such as Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Haifa Museum of Art, and took part in many other international shows in Berlin, New York, Milan, Paris, Hamburg, Glasgow, Marseille and Copenhagen. Sapir lives and works in Tel Aviv.
Curator: Tali Tamir
Donation: Tomer Sapir’s work Untitled, from Terra incognita was donated to the collection of the Petach Tikva Museum of Art by the artist and Outset Contemporary Art Fund.
