In 2015 Outset Israel supported a work by Tomer Sapir for the group show Agro-Art at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art. Agro-Art explored 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 was constructed as a cross between a greenhouse, a bunker for seed preservation, and a biological research lab; it simulated a vegetal gene pool which (metaphorically) preserved the 'evolutionary intelligence' assimilated in the grain over millennia of agriculture.
Tomer Sapir operated 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 generated 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.
ON VIEW: 19th February - 13th June 2015
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.
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.
