On Friday, Doron Langberg, one of the most successful and best-known Israeli artists working today, will have his first New York exhibition in seven years at Jeffrey Deitch’s Tribeca gallery. To this end, Lamberg has chosen to give an interview so far—— new york times— and published an accompanying 750-word text on Deitch’s website outlining how his new work reflects on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Lamberg has not spoken extensively about the issue in the past. He is best known for his portraits and domestic scenes that explore queer life, gender, and sexuality. He cited the influences of David Hockney, Wolfgang Tillmans and Mikalyn Thomas; in 2019 jewish trends In the feature, Lamberg and several other LGBTQIA+ painters, including Louis Fratino and Salman Toor, are described as part of a movement known as “New Queer Intimism.”
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A graduate of the prestigious Yale School of Art, Lamberg has exhibited at the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York and the Schwüers Museum in Berlin, created a work commissioned by New York’s Public Art Fund, and was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the painting was briefly exhibited before closing its Modern and Contemporary Art wing and completing renovations.
However, as Lamberg said era Interviewer Julia Halperin’s footage of Gaza’s destruction in the years after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 left him with a creative block and a feeling that he could no longer find “the same meaning” in his work. The new body of work includes monumental landscapes taken from places of personal and political significance, including Drohobych in Ukraine, where his father was born and survived the Holocaust. The works, Lamberg said, trace his process of questioning the meaning of his Jewish identity and the nature of his home when it “committed atrocities.”
While the choice of subject may have obscured the connection to the conflict, Lamberg told Halperin he wanted to make his political stance clear. “Whatever the circumstances, Palestinians deserve justice and liberation,” he said. “By choosing to ignore unspeakable horrors in favor of protecting Jewish life, we destroy ourselves and countless others.”
In the accompanying text on Deitch’s site, Lamberg describes how visiting and painting the site in relation to his family’s Holocaust history, and then returning to New York, helped him see “a worldview outside the maelstrom of Israeli ideology and its thorny logic.”
“Witnessing the immeasurable loss and cruelty that occurred there through these small paintings made me think of Gaza,” he wrote. “The large-scale works I created after returning to New York—one depicting a shadowy expanse of tree trunks, another depicting night-glowing treetops seen from a fallen perspective—concreted my family’s life and death in the forest they loved. Creating these works allowed me to mourn them, to frame my grief as a personal experience rather than a means to justify an endless cycle of bloodshed. Freed from the constraints of ideology, my history became a source of moral clarity.”
While Israel and Hamas agreed to a U.S.-brokered ceasefire last fall that has largely been maintained through multiple phases, the IDF has carried out regular airstrikes in Gaza since the ceasefire was signed in October, killing 509 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel said the attack was in response to ceasefire violations by Hamas. According to reports, more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, a figure the IDF said it accepted.
