Gallery Loupe is honored to present a posthumous exhibition—All the World’s a Stage—for Israeli artist Attai Chen, who passed away in 2023, at the age of 44. The exhibition includes the series Matter of Perspective, Terra Mutantica, Dioramas, and Prayer Nuts. It is the inaugural showing of the last two. The exhibition also features a large sculpture and drawings, and is accompanied by a commemorative book, published by Arnoldsche Art Publishers, with essays by Glenn Adamson and Sool Park.

The exhibition will be in the library at Pratt Institute, 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, from November 18 to December 13. An opening reception and panel discussion with international guests, along with a commentary by Glenn Adamson, will be held on Monday, November 18, 5:00-6:30pm.

The following is excerpted from Glenn Adamson, “Small Worlds, After All” in All the World’s a Stage (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2024).  

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Over the past few years, [Attai Chen] has been constructing his own kind of space, free from the “perfect, synthetic, and enforced” laws of perspective. This act of self-liberation has a revolutionary aspect. …It does not show us space from an external point of view, but rather supplements bodies moving within space, focusing and articulating our attention to them.  

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Chen’s recent creative trajectory, …began in 2016 with his series Matter of Perspective. Materially, these pieces are continuous with his previous oeuvre, in that they are constructed primarily from small shards of paper. The title and predominantly lens-like format of the works, however, indicate a new preoccupation with vision.   

…Chen recalls wanting to “impose order on the chaos” that had characterized his practice up until then. The works are made mainly of tiny prisms, arranged in closed ranks and executed in a subtle grisaille palette. They somewhat resemble crystalline geological formations, with textures that feel not so much made as mined. What chiefly interested Chen in making these works, however, were their internal vectors, the shifting dynamics that they contained.

All this …has now culminated in a new body of work, to which Chen has given the collective title All the World’s A Stage. The phrase is from Shakespeare, of course (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII), and it signals an extrovert theatricality, oscillating in tone between the comedic and the tragic. Color is back in this series, the gray tones of Matter of Perspective yielding to an exuberant palette. Yet the pieces can also be read as dystopian: ruinous cityscapes, collapsed buildings, billowing smoke. They were made in the shadow not only of the Covid pandemic, but also of ongoing conflict in Gaza and Syria, and the horrific explosion that engulfed downtown Beirut in August of 2020. More recently still, Chen’s native country of Israel has entered a period of unprecedented right-wing rule. He has no desire to keep any of this contemporary history at bay. An existential unsettlement has entered the work; it convulses with the shock of the now.

……….What Chen is after, right now, is pervasive contingency. It’s for this reason that he has embraced the theater – and specifically, the plays of Shakespeare, with their gleeful gamesmanship concerning personal identity – as a working premise. The stage offers itself as a master metaphor. Like “all the men and women merely players” of As You Like It, his pieces “have their exits and entrances.” They act out the idea of space, rather than simply depicting it.

……Like most jewelers, he is essentially a miniaturist, a devotee of the art of compression. This is abundantly apparent in a subgroup of pieces in All the World’s A Stage, which extend his earlier lens-like compositions into a hemispherical format. They are inspired by …carved boxwood “prayer nuts,” which were made primarily in the Netherlands, in the sixteenth century. It’s not surprising that Chen should admire these extraordinarily intricate objects. They are not only marvels of skill, but also show just how much space can be forced into a small, non-perspectival volume….

It is impossible to believe that [Chen’s] work would take the forms that it has, were it not for the prevailing conditions of vision in our time, which are, of course, digital in nature. Computers see without actually looking. The internet creates the illusion that all points of reference are instantly available, while also thoroughly decontextualizing them. As the artist-theorist Hito Steyerl observed in her 2011 essay “In Free Fall,” …the “stable and single point of view is being supplemented (and often replaced) by multiple perspectives, overlapping windows, distorted flight lines, and divergent vanishing points.”

Chen offers a counterpoint to this fractured, infinite sea of immaterial imagery. He responds to the frictionless flow of the present – the distraction machine that we all inhabit, in which truth and falsity are inextricable entwined – with his own, equally fluid but exquisitely crafted microcosms. They are “fabrications” in every sense of that word: made up from scratch, putting on a good show, at once assertively tangible and entirely elusive. Hold one in your palm, and take a close look: what you’ll see is a world nothing like our own, which nonetheless grasps it whole.

A graduate of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Chen also held a graduate degree from the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. In 2010, he won the Herbert Hofmann Prize at SCHMUCK, Munich and in 2011 the Oberbayerischer Prize for Applied Art.  A brooch from Matter of Perspective was included in SCHMUCK 2017. Chen received the 2014 Andy Prize for Contemporary Art in Israel, which granted him a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where his work is in the permanent collection. Chen is also represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Die Neue Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, among others.  

Purchase book here