born in Romania, 1956
lives and works in Tel Aviv


Philip Rantzer is one of the fathers of readymade in contemporary Israeli art. Since the 1980s, he has been collecting and gathering parts of old furniture, bicycles, carriages, accessories, clothes and shoelaces, photographs and paintings. All of the objects and materialsare accorded equal status in his studio, and are later swallowed up in his works, without distinguishing between objects of art and remains of high culture (a piano cover, for example) and the lowliest items in the flea market. He does a wonderful job of juggling all of these, whether he intervenes in some way or whether he leaves them as they are.

Rantzer is generally viewed as a sculptor, or at least as an artist who works with materials in three dimensions. But here he presents wall works that actually react to painting, in the spirit of the argument of Thierry de Duve, according to which Duchamp's readymade is a response to the tradition of painting. The wall work in black and white is composed of picture frames and a piano cover, which create an abstract geometric painting-relief. The colorful shoelaces pose as expressive paint drips and create an expressive abstract painting. The act of painting becomes readymade; the language and style of painting become readymade material, no less than the shoelaces.