Michael Kovner

Ezekiel
Ezekiel is an amalgam of the real and imagined traits of my father, Abba Kovner, a resistance fighter, a partisan, a poet, and an historian. Each of us had been preoccupied with his own inner world, and the conversation we both wanted failed to take place. This conversation is in a way conducted in this auto-fictional book, Ezekiel, and at the Bochum exhibition which follows the book.
The main part of the exhibition is composed of paintings and digital images which are included in my book - presented at the entrance. Ezekiel, a former partisan (as my father), leaves the kibbutz (unlike my father) and we see him alone in his Jerusalem apartment. He falls accidently in the shower room and while lying on the floor he re-experience images of his troubling past.

The Kibbutz Yard
The Kibbutz Yard It’s an interior scenic space like the kind of the kibbutz courtyard that Michael Kovner never painted before. He painted expensive landscapes of nature and he has painted urban landscapes as well, as in the series of New York paintings that he produced shortly before he began the kibbutz series. His New York cityscapes, however, appear to be viewed through the windows of an apartment house or a car, observed but not experienced via the body. Not so are his works in the kibbutz-yard series—saturated painting that communicates the looming height of the crown of a tree, the changing proportions in motion, the depth of a shadow on the ground, and the flickering of light in space.Generally speaking, this experiencing of trees on the kibbutz may be the point of departure for Michael Kovner’s idea of painting the kibbutz yard. It’s true that trees grow all over, but something especially complex and sensitive seems to cross this of all places, the kibbutz yard, which for Michael Kovner opened a gateway to a personal journey that began in 2012 and ended in 2017.The kibbutz courtyards that he chose have a rural and intimate character. Their modest scenic web is the same everywhere. They are good places to walk in, to walk around, and to feel at home in quickly. Kovner did not choose kibbutzim such as Ein Harod, Givat Haim, and Givat Brenner, affiliates of the "Large Group" movement that integrated components of "village" and "town" into its architectural and economic planning.