Ori Gersht

Fallen trees. Verdant landscapes. Lofty mountains overlooking deep rolling valleys. The stunning natural beauty of the subjects of Israeli-born, London-based Ori Gersht’s photography leaves viewers breathless. But the natural splendor belies the significance of these locations as the sites of historical events we can no longer plainly see.

In Ori Gersht: Force of Natures—Film and Photography, the evolution of the artist’s basic process is explored in a series of powerfully expressive full-color photographs. Searching for traces of the past, Gersht translates the process of remembering into images. The majestic peaks of the Pyrenees, for instance, are revealed in the photographer’s thoughtful focus as the site of a desperate flight from Nazi-occupied France. Throughout his works, Gersht unfolds a complex metaphor for the impenetrable relationship between the past and present, death and life.

Gersht’s works have been the subject of major solo exhibitions in the United States, at places such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; as well as many internationally acclaimed museums. Collecting Gersht’s works from 1999 to the present, this book reveals the artist’s remarkable career.

History Repeating is the first comprehensive survey of the Israeli-born photographer and video artist Ori Gersht (born 1967). This richly illustrated book presents the best of Gersht's achingly beautiful images, and explores how he intertwines spectacles of painterly and narrative imagery with personal and collective memory, metaphysical journeys, contextualized spaces and the history of art and photography.

Be it in the scars left on the sunlit yet war-torn buildings in Sarajevo, the white noise of his train journey to Auschwitz, or the clearing of trees in a forest that once stood witness to mass murder in Ukraine, Gersht's vision bridges a history that is full of violent horror and a world of emergent, transcendent beauty. From the radiant optical glow of pollution in the atmosphere to his freeze-frame shots of shattering floral arrangements frozen by liquid nitrogen, Gersht's calm is one that comes after the storm.

In his 2010 series of Japanese landscapes, the ghostly visual static of cherry-blossom petals echo the militarism and sacrificed youth of World War II and the more recent nuclear fallout of Fukushima, but in their own extreme transience, they also manage to embody the possibility of spiritual renewal. History Repeating demonstrates the thin line between beauty and brutality and the sublime draftsmanship behind history's various traumatic scars. History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as unexpected beauty.