Geula Neighbourhood

David Goss presents a new body of work, developed over the past year out of his extended artistic exploration of the museum and its surroundings. The works converge into a painterly-sculptural installation that seeks to activate the space not only as a setting for display, but as a historically, ideologically and politically charged material platform, wherein an associative and critical fabric is weaved that regards the present moment.

Two fundamental starting points frame the exhibition. One has to do with the museum’s physical and symbolic location. It straddles the seam between Geula – today, a Haredi neighborhood, founded in the 1920s as part of the expansion of the Jewish community in Jerusalem beyond its ancient walls – and the Old City and Temple Mount, places laden with religious, nationalist and messianic connotations. The very name “Geula” (Hebrew for “Redemption”) carries eschatological anticipations, whereas the vicinity of the various sites charts a dense geography of faith-based and nationalist aspirations – from ultra-Orthodox separatism, through fanatic visions of the establishment of a Third Temple, to apocalyptic myths of Armageddon, which are also tied to nearby Gehenna, or Valley of Hinnom (Hell).

The second point of departure is a series of monochromatic paintings by American abstract artist Frank Stella, created in response to violent events in Apartheid-era South Africa. The dialogue with Stella’s work – identified with formal minimalism but also with implicit political depth – allows Goss, himself born in Cape Town, to interlace a network of visual and thematic contexts, where questions of artistic representation entwine with personal and historical memories of domination, exclusion, and racial supremacy.

At the core of the exhibition are large-scale landscapes created by Goss using gum Arabic – a transparent, pigment-free base material applied directly to the gallery walls in areas where windows of the original building were once sealed. The paintings emerge like optic illusions, a kind of fata morgana or trompe-l'œil — ironically playing on the notion of paintings as a window to reality. Simultaneously real and ethereal, these mirages summon the utopian dream of the Promised Land, manic visions of eternal war, and a palpable sense of loss — of apertures, lookouts and light.

Alongside them, the artist showcases a group of oil paintings forming a puzzle-like ensemble — a deliberate stylistic mélange of neighborhood scenes, architectural details, and abstract works in fleshy-red hues, which combine Stella’s formal language with geometric motifs inspired by local tile patterns. Scattered among them, crouching on fragments of furniture and flooring, are red heifers – a macabre allegory of bestialization and sacrificial ritual, or a dystopian premonition of the end of days.

Geula arrays a phantasmagoria of images, allusions and reverberations where narratives of salvation and destruction, sanctity and violence, representation and reality converge and clash. In a site steeped in historical sediment and fraught with tension, Goss makes room for a reflexive gaze and an alternative vision of sightedness and awareness – and perhaps even disenchantment.