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10/10/2013

Jacques Katmor and The 3rd Eye Group

The Horse Hospital, London

Formed in the early 70’s by maverick artist Jacques Katmor, ‘The 3rd Eye Group’ established itself as the sole counter-cultural phenomena in Israel. They collectively sought, through their art, films, installations, interventions and fanzines, to challenge politics, sexuality, and identity in the specific context of Jewish Israeli society and culture which was deeply patriotic and conservative in the aftermath of the victorious 1967 Six Day War.

This retrospective exhibition focuses predominantly on Katmor’s prolific, multi-disciplinary output from 1964 to 1975. Abstract line drawings, collages and plaster etchings, automatic, monochrome maps punctuated with arcs and triangles of true primary colour, suggesting an intimate, universal geometry running through all chaos and order, occult re-imaginings of Guy Debord’s Psychogeographic guide of Paris.

Overtly sexual and violent imagery seeping from the Free Love movement onto paper and celluloid echoing Bellmer’s erotic anagrammatic bodies and André Masson’s automatic drawings. Woman as an image, manipulated, severed and “explored” with a heavy, arty, 1970’s misogynist approach.

Katmor who was born in Egypt in 1938 to a wealthy Jewish family, travelled to Switzerland and Paris, where he studied art at the Beaux Arts and was profoundly influenced by surrealism and American experimental cinema. Katmor identified with the subversion of Dadaism and the American beat movement, Lettrism and psycho-geography as conceived by the Situationists.

In 1960 he immigrated to Israel where he joined the Israeli Defence Force and fought in the Six Day War, later he refused to take part in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Katmor brought with him a continental sensibility and a longing for an avant-garde, cultural relevance and a desire to lay down some foundation of modernism in an isolated country that defined itself through military supremacy and the holocaust narrative. Part Zionist, part cultured, liberal European, Katmor was driven by an urgency to unravel his own fragmented identity within the violence of this new and contradictory nation and self-liberate through drugs, sex and creation.

In 1974 after harassment and hostility from both the police and the art establishment “The 3rd Eye Group” disbanded, Katmor and his wife Anne left Israel, disillusioned, shattered dreams and failed utopia, they eventually settled in Amsterdam which in 1970s offered funding for artists, a cosmopolitan atmosphere, legal drugs and sexual liberation, there his explorative practice became more transgressive and darker, embracing a rawer punk aesthetic.

The exhibition is curated by Ori Drumer, who was a member of radical post-punk, noise band Duralex Sedlex in the 1980’s.

SCREENINGS + EVENTS

A WOMAN’S CASE (1969), ISRAEL – JACQUES MORY KATMOR

A landmark in Israeli cinema: one of the first avant-garde experiments, ‘A woman’s Case’ proposes woman as metaphor, the film occupies three levels: a feature documentary collage, a cinematic essay laden with references to history of art, literature and pop culture and an experiment to translate drawing into film.

An advertising man meets a model in the studio of sculptor, they embark on a journey together – for one day – through different spaces in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: A hotel, a stairway, an apartment, streets, a cafe, a restaurant, a nightclub a collaged space connecting pop culture, Surrealism, death, eroticism and violence. The film’s soundtrack was written by ‘The Churchills’ a seminal Israeli psychedelic garage band.

This film represented Israel for the first time in 1969 at The Venice Film Festival.

POP 70 (1970), POP STAR 71 (1972), ISRAEL – JACQUES MORY KATMOR 60MINS

Segments of the first pop promos made in Israel, including documentation of the local Israel psychedelic garage scene, bands made of immigrants from Arab countries and Eastern Europe that recently settled in Israel. Bands include The Churchills, The Spiders and more

Produced by The 3rd Eye Group.

THE JOURNEY (1971), ISRAEL – JACQUES MORY KATMOR 10MINS

A poetic, abstract journey through Yosl Bergner’s paintings, a surrealistic Israeli painter that combined Jewish motifs and personal symbolism. The camera wanders and cinematic editing create a new order, a new context for Bergner’s paintings.

Produced by The 3rd Eye Group.

THE HOLE (1972-1974), ISRAEL – JACQUES MORY KATMOR 15MINS

The film predicts the Yom Kippur War (1973) with members of the group testifying that already a year before the war broke you could feel disaster in the air. Katmor and the other members of the group refused to fight in the war. Based on a story by Bernard Melamud, in the film Katmor self-directs a funeral, burying himself alive in a secular ritual conducted under the influence of LSD. Katmor creates a Kabbalistic-psychedelia inside a theological model built on symbolic thought. Autonomous camera movements create a triangle within which the film is conducted.

Produced by The 3rd Eye Group.

SIGN (1974, ISRAEL – JACQUES MORY KATMOR 25MINS

A dark, cosmic film, an apocalyptic vision, Katmor documents a filmed journey through the world of images of Russian painter, Michail Grobman. Grobman belongs to second Russian avant-garde movement, Grobman painted heavy symbolist paintings, with Kabbalistic magic imagery drawn from Jewish legends and folklore. Soundtrack by Faust.

Produced by The 3rd Eye Group.

AVI PITCHON – ISRAELI UNDERGROUND MUSIC

Writer and curator Avi Pitchon, who’s book about Israel’s counterculture of the 1980s is out in 2014, will provide an overview of underground music in Israel from the ’60s to present day, from the days of a homogenic mobilised society to a present of rapture and paradigmatic disintegration.

PRIVATE VIEW: Fri 11th October 7:30pm

The Horse Hospital
Colonnade, Bloomsbury London WC1N 1JD
MON-SAT 12-6PM

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