Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents a monographic exhibition of works by Israeli artist Amos Gitai. For several years Gitai has used various modes of artistic expression, ranging from films, theater, installations and photography. This has led to more and more frequent invitations from many museums including MoMA, Reina Sofia, and the Centre Pompidou.

His favourite themes, history and all it entails and people's destiny in the face of potentially overwhelming odds, are the subjects of a formal and thematic quest, which he pursues relentlessly. Here, his photographic work also becomes an interrogation of different narrative modes. His photos become visual ellipses, their figurative quality almost vanishing into abstraction.

In the exhibition, Army Day Horizontal. Army Day Vertical Amos Gitai presents two Super 8 films Before & After and Black & White along with a series of previously unseen photographs. Amos Gitai continues his work of decoding and conducting a post-mortem on that instant when experience of what has happened turns into personal memory. It is a process in which the subject disappears; what appears in its place is the extreme density of thick, granular, matter translating the stigmata of time and resulting in something with a painterly aspect. What artistic modes can give a proper account of that event, that trauma? What traces did it leave in the memory – a few weeks after, or forty years after? The artist's quest is nourished reciprocally and simultaneously by both film and photography.

In parallel with the exhibition at Pantin, the exhibition Amos Gitai, architecte de la mémoire along with a retrospective of his films will be presented at the Cinémathèque française (Paris) from 26 February to 6 July 2014. On this occasion, the book Amos Gitai, architecte de la mémoire has been co-published by Gallimard and the Cinémathèque.

From 5 February to 19 May 2014, the Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid) presents a large exhibition on Amos Gitai, taking the form of an intellectual biography of the artist and his many modes of expression.

-Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris

Image: © Amos Gitai