Two solo exhibitions of works by Elie Shamir are on view concurrently at two museums, under the joint title Boundaries of Gaze. They highlight different facets of his work: the Portrait Time exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art focuses on the artist’s portraiture, and the one on display here, Boundaries, centers on his landscape paintings. In practice, these two bodies of work were produced at the same time, and are often intertwined – such as a portrait planted in a landscape, or a landscape that encapsulates a person’s identity. Together, the two exhibitions offer a comprehensive presentation of Shamir’s work, which engages with Israeli masculinity and the Zionist ethos through art as a bearer of beauty, compassion, and recognition of the limits of the human gaze.
