Untitled Folding Objects (U.F.O.)
Reuven Israel: U.F.O. (Untitled Folding Object) 1329
March 8, 2025 – May 18, 2025
Kinosaito Arts Center, Verplanck, NY
Curator’s Statement
U.F.O. (Untitled Folding Object) 1329 is a solo presentation that consists of a site-specific installation and a series of related drawings by the Brooklyn-based artist Reuven Israel. This exhibition continues the artist’s abiding interest in architecture and sacred spaces’ overlapping and conflicting histories.
Israel responds to the original structure of the gallery at KinoSaito. Formerly a Catholic school, the room’s height and large, gridded windows are reflected in the composition and scale of the installation, tailor-made to fit the space. Its title, Untitled Folding Object, refers to Israel’s ongoing series of tessellated sculptures. The number 1329 is the amount of individual components it consists of. The artist created 1329 small birch elements for this installation, laminating them with colored PVC edge-banding. Each standard part has the potential to unfold like a thread to form countless configurations within the space. The experience may be considered uncanny as if stepping into a pixelated image or a woven rug – an interconnected, total, and enclosed sculptural environment that holds within itself the tension of its unraveling self-destruction.
The piece begins as a flat rectangle on the gallery floor, with a diamond-shaped central void inspired by designs of Islamic courtyards (which often feature water at their center). For each unfolding structure, the segments stretch out and expand into three-dimensional space, leaving more swathes of the bare floor where they once neatly fit.
U.F.O. (Untitled Folding Object) 1329, is inspired by early modernist art movements, as well as Navajo and Hopi weaving traditions, Op Art, science fiction, video games, and sacred geometry. While U.F.O. (Untitled Folding Object) 1329 sprawls the length of the space, with visitors able to walk around it, a series of preliminary drawings adorn the gallery walls, inviting viewers in.
–Kathy Battista
Additional Text by Joshua Cohen
Reuven Israel, born 1978, Jerusalem, and working in New York since 2012, is a sculptor of potential utopias, whose works begin below our feet and end, or never end, above our heads as protean soaring skylines. In plain terms, what this sculpture requires is the construction of a floor, which Israel tends to refer to by an acronym, in a previous installation as F.L.O.O.R.: Formulated, Liminal, Oblique, Openable, Rectangles, and in this show as U.F.O., Untitled Folding Object. This is a mat-like object that consists of rectangular wooden segments, some plain, and others colored. Many of the segments that create this tessellation, this abstract mosaic, are moveable: In the current installation, U.F.O. 1329 (the number referring to the sum of the PVC-laminated birch segments), they can be folded out of the superficially 2-D surface that resembles a technologized Oriental textile and raised above to create the impression of abstracted buildings, office-and-residential structures, or animal-like and plant-like towers, which last however long the artist himself might decide, before being folded back — like retractable limbs — into the body. It's this decision-making process — the choice to activate certain parts of this operable rug or carpet, how and for how long — that turns Israel’s often site-specific sculptures into long-duration performances, kinetic experiments in the creation and evolution and eventual devolution and destruction of an imaginary urbs, utopian — in the purest sense — because unpeopled. It strikes me that some of Israel’s inspiration is suggested by his surname — chiefly the socialism of early Zionism, which was a universalizing ideology applied to a parochial ideology like a glossy veneer atop workaday plywood — while his work also points to engagement in traditional Middle Eastern (Arabic and Persian, as well as Jewish) decorative arts, in which ornament and pattern are not background but foreground, all-ground, usurping representation, which is religiously proscribed. There is a mystical principle at work here, wherein the pieces or tiles that contain a latent ability to express themselves or be expressed in erected 3-D become an analogue to the hidden resources of the alphabet, whose individual letters, when combined by a kabbalist, can function mathematically and speak secret wisdom. Reuven Israel is one of the great kabbalists of abstract sculpture.
–Joshua Cohen
Reuven Israel: U.F.O. (Untitled Folding Object) 1329. Baltic Birch, PVC and brass hardware, installation view at CCA Tel Aviv-Jaffa
Photos by Elisheva Gavra
Performance Photos by Chika Kobari
Reuven Israel: F.L.O.O.R. (Formulated, Liminal, Oblique, Openable, Rectangles)
September 29, 2021 – December 31, 2021
C.C.A Tel Aviv
Working within the tradition of sculpture and simultaneously questioning its very essence, Reuven Israel (*1978, Jerusalem; lives and works in New York) is a master of opposite solutions. His work often starts from disparate positions and ideas that he links together to reach an endpoint which conveys a deep sense of visual and conceptual harmony, as if an equilibrium could only be reached through tension. Associating the algid aesthetics of minimal art and Finish Fetish with the playful look of children’s toys, appropriating elements of modern architecture with the visual vocabulary of ancient sites of worship, adopting the legacy of monumental sculpture in order to transform it into modifiable pieces, Israel’s objects represent a unique position in the landscape of Israeli art.
For his solo exhibition at CCA Tel Aviv, the artist conceived a new site-specific sculptural installation commissioned and produced by the Center and tailored for its first floor gallery. The work, entitled F.L.O.O.R. (Formulated, Liminal, Oblique, Openable, Rectangles), consists of thousands of wooden segments laminated in different colors. Tiling the exhibition space, these segments create tessellated geometric patterns that crisscross throughout the gallery, covering most of its floor. To physically enter the heart of the installation, to literally go through the work, visitors are obliged to tread on the locking rows of colorful segments. Unfolding from this tiled floor, multiple sculptural structures sprout up, leaving empty gaps in the tessellated wooden surface, where the pieces of wood once lay. Further advancing into the installation, the tiled floor breaks up into groups of segments creating geometric patterns and leaving swathes of bare floor to complete their negative spaces. On the other side of the installation, joint pieces of wood unravel – stretching across the gallery floor and spiraling into a loop, similar to a loose thread – and untie the work, giving a sense of transient temporality.
Israel explores the notion of “sculpture as place,” coined by artist Carl Andre, and furthers it by presenting sculpture not only as a physical place but as a virtual one as well. The unified wooden components are the standard components of the entire environment holding the potential of countless configurations to emerge into the three-dimensional space. The towering geometric structures resemble people integrated within a place, moving, taking actions, and some are folded back to fit neatly into the tiled floor. Inspired by early modernist art movements, Navajo and Hopi weaving traditions, Op Art, and sacred geometry, the overall experience is somewhat uncanny as if stepping into a pixelated image or a woven rug – an interconnected, total, and enclosed sculptural environment that holds within itself the tension of self-destruction.
“Reuven Israel: F.L.O.O.R. (Formulated, Liminal, Oblique, Openable, Rectangles)” is curated by Nicola Trezzi. The exhibition is accompanied by printed matter in Hebrew, Arabic and English and an artist talk in Hebrew on September 30, 2021.
“Reuven Israel: F.L.O.O.R. (Formulated, Liminal, Oblique, Openable, Rectangles)” is supported by the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, Sam Ben-Avraham, Sonia S. Cummings, Giora Kaplan, Thomas Rom, Marc Schimmel, Chaim Zach and the artist’s representing galleries – Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, and Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles; hospitality provided by Outset Contemporary Art Fund.
F.L.O.O.R. (Formulated, Liminal, Oblique, Openable, Rectangles), 2021. Baltic Birch, PVC and brass hardware, installation view at CCA Tel Aviv-Jaffa
Photos by Elad Sarig
In Four Acts
November 3, 2018 - December 20, 2018
Nazarian / Curcio, L.A.
In Four Acts features a series of new works that occupy the floor and walls of the gallery. Each sculpture originates in a flat, compact state, but is modular and has the potential to expand to form multiple variations of itself.
The exhibition title refers to the dynamic state of the exhibition. During the course of the show, the works gradually unfold from minimal configurations into more elaborate adaptations. Each sculpture will change four times over the course of the exhibition, with each modification resulting in a new visual landscape.
In Four Acts, 2018. Baltic Birch, PVC and brass hardware, installation view at Nazarian / Curcio, L.A.
Photos curtesy of the gallery.
Offshoot
November 29, 2018- January 31, 2019
Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv
The exhibition "Offshoot" features a new series of wooden artworks sweeping across the expanse of the gallery's floor and walls. Each sculpture is inherently modular, originating from a flat, compact state that harbors the potential to expand and unfurl into manifold variations of itself. Assembled from distinct segments of oak, the surface of each piece is meticulously finished with paint and varnish, culminating in a vibrant chromatic spectrum. As the viewer navigates through the space, the surrounding elements visually shift—appearing to recede or project, flat yet profoundly three-dimensional, evoking forms that are simultaneously familiar and distinctly alien.
Offshoot, 2019. Baltic Birch, PVC and brass hardware, installation view at Braverman Gallery.
Photos by Elad Sarig
Untitled Folding Object 174A, 2022
November 29, 2022 – December 3, 2022
SARAHCROWN Gallery, New York
at UNTITLED, Miami Beach
PVC on Baltic Birch and stainless steel hardware.
Photos by Nuria Rius