Iris Sara Schiller
Jean-Louis Andral and Marie-Laure Bernadac, Iris Sara Schiller : une fille est une fille est une fille d’une fille, exh. cat., musée Picasso, Antibes (octobre 2003 – janvier 2004)
→Madeleine Van Doren et Ami Barak, Iris Sara Schiller, exh. cat., Centre d’Art d’Ivry, Ivry-sur-Seine (Mars – May 1994), Frac Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier (May – July 1994), Ivry-sur-Seine, Centre d’Art d’Ivry, Montpellier, FRAC Languedoc-Roussilon, 1994
→Iris Sara Schiller : Archéologie de l’âme 1985-89, exh. cat., galerie Zabriskie, Paris (September – October 1990), Paris, Zabriskie, 1990
Stella Maris, Musée Picasso, Antibes, June 26 – September 9, 2018
→Eaux s’en haut, eaux d’en bas, musée d’art et d’histoire du judaïsme, Paris, December 2008 – January 2009
→Rites de deuil, Centre d’art contemporain la synagogue de Delme, Delme, September -December 2000
Israeli sculptor and videographer.
After studying at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Iris Sara Schiller moved to Paris. Her work combines sculpture, photography, video, drawing and text. With passion and lucidity, she confronts questions that haunt us, transgressing the taboos of birth, sexuality, family ties and mourning. She began with sculpture: first using terracotta, then wood; they give birth to organic, sensual forms, evoking Hans Arp and his biomorphic eroticism of fertility. After this quest for truth that she found in natural elements, the artist introduced other techniques – cement, stone, resin – then plaster, which became her material of choice. “The use of body moulding appeared in response to the death of a loved one,” she explains. Her main focuses are now part of a “rite of mourning”, a state of mind that has provoked in her a new attitude towards the human body by legitimizing the effects and the appearance of the figurative object in her work (2002). To mould a human body – as one takes the imprint of a deceased face to keep the trace – the memory of the envelope of flesh, of this skin.
I. S. Schiller went from the core of beings to their envelope. What happens to the body after death? “In studying the Kabbalah, I discovered the enigmatic and seductive term Tselem: a subtle sheath that coats the soul” (2002). The question of the double, of feminine/masculine duality, is expressed in various ways in hybrid figures often combined or paired. I. S. Schiller seeks to give form to the fusional state of love – whether it be maternal, filial or fraternal– while questioning the projection of the self in the other. She often works with fragmented bodies, favouring arms, torsos, hearts and arteries. Plaster figures spread almost clinically across steel surgical tables, the suspended body of a girl, legs spread, the pierced chairs and basins evoking a cold and threatening world where strange ceremonies take place. In 2005 she won the Grand Prix of the 50th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival for her video La Tresse de ma mère (My mother’s braid), in which the hair, that of the mother and the daughter, plays a central role. Composed of violence and sensuality, this work is representative of I. S. Schiller’s approach, which combines archaic gestures with biographical memories.
© Éditions des femmes – Antoinette Fouque, 2013
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2020
