Yehudit Sasportas (born 1969 in Tel Aviv) is amongst the most important contemporary Israeli artists and represented the country at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 with an installation fort he Israeli Pavilion.
In her works, Yehudit Sasportas builds up, captures and dissolves the tension between the inside and outside, between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality in numerous ways.
Her landscapes of swampy woods, dark lakes and rotten tree trunks are often pinked through with black bars that protrude the view like scraggy skeletons. While at first sight the viewer thinks himself to be facing a wide panorama, this impression is destroyed by branches growing into the middle of the picture piercing through the peaceful landscape. In this dense forest, the look wanders up from the horizon to the sky searching for a point of focus. Whirling circles that sprout out the blunt branches make it even harder to orientate and let the alleged nature start to reel and turn into abstraction. Like the light and dark colour shades the images oscillate between idyll and apocalypse, harmonic form and turbulence, day and night. Yehudit Sasportas' works are rather mental landscapes than pictured reality and image of an inner psyche that is lying under the visible surface that is symbolised by nature in the sense of Caspar David Friedrich. An ever occurring motive is the swamp which keeps its real depth hidden in secret and only lets one guess what lies underneath on it's grounds.
In the last years Yehudit Sasportas set her landscapes in motion in several video installations and composed them into a fictive nature that shifts between a floating underwater world and the quiet vastness of swampy clearings. They also carry an unconscious terrestrial space that lies behind the naturally defined forms of reality.
Filip Luyckx, Yehudit Sasportas. Guardians of the pearls shadow, Sint-Lukasstichting V.Z.W. 2006.