ABOUT
Guy Eytan (b.1984, Israel) Originally from Haifa. Currently works and lives in Leipzig, Germany.
An Intermedia artist who earned his BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem (2010), MFA as well as a MAVCS from SAIC The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2014, 2015). His work has been exhibited in more than twenty group shows in Israel, Canada and the United states.
His artistic practice include: Sculpture, Video, performance, Installation, and mixed media sculpture. He also practices in curating, academic and literary writing, archivism, editing and teaching.
Personally a non believer, Guy often uses motifs from early Christianity while pushing Animism towards Objectophilia. In his work he pokes serious fun at ideas like eternal life and the unanswered questions through implicating personal relation with humanity's collective memory.
It’s difficult to access if Guy uses science to prove Absurdism or If he is really exploring his own angst by using Art as a dark fantasy platform. The bulk of the work is in the spirit of romantic conceptualism that even when performative, insists on maintaining intimacy with a viewer/ viewers as opposed to spectator/ audience. In his practice the works are always more projects than pieces, the art object is usually allusive or a by product of an event/ experiment/happening/performance, the material of his work is often with use of his own body. There is always a mild element of self harming or the risk of doing so in a serious soft representation of a BDSM relationship in which the viewers and the art the dominant side, but also a mocking reenactment of the suffering artist, the artist suffers for the art but always almost not at all. A recurring element in Guy’s work is a preserving the forgotten, less in an attempt to save it from the ash heap of history, and more as a way to find, archive, discover the ways the forgotten past still haunts us, comes back uninvited.. Accordingly while some fine art academia and contemporary art are less focused this period of time, It seems guy is highly affected by The Middle ages, when alchemy, sorcery, religion, witchcraft and perhaps art were one and the same.
Written by: Tal Gilad
September 2017