Guy Eytan
Website Introduction
Text by Tal Gilad and Guy Eytan
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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, Germany, Canada and the United states.
His artistic practice includes sculpture, video, performance, installation, and mixed media sculpture. He also practices 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 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 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 or performance, and he often uses his body as a material for his work. There is always a mild element of self harming or a risk of doing so in a serious but soft representation of a BDSM relationship; in this relationship,the viewers and the art are the dominant actors and in the same time seems as 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 preserving the forgotten, less in an attempt to save it from the ash heap of history, but more as a way to find, archive, discover the ways the forgotten past still haunts us, comes back uninvited. In a similar way, while some Fine Art Academia and Contemporary Art are less focused on The Middle Ages, it seems that Guy is highly affected by this period of time, when alchemy, sorcery, religion, witchcraft and perhaps Art, were one and the same.
Selected Works, Photos: courtesy of Guy Eytan
