‘Hallel’
Downtown gallery with local owner showcases Oren Fischer’s art
To walk into 81 Leonard Gallery in lower Manhattan is to be overwhelmed by the color. Huge pieces of art, with enormous expanses of bright color.
It’s not intimidating, it’s not off-putting, and most certainly it is not saccharine. It’s immersive. It’s encompassing. It makes you want to keep looking at it.
A lot of it makes you happy.
It’s an exhibit called “Hallel,” by Israeli artist Oren Fischer. As 81 Leonard Gallery’s creator and owner, the painter Nancy Pantirer of Short Hills, puts it, it’s spiritual. “They’re overwhelming in size, so you’re taken in by them right away,” she said.
“Oren is a multimedia artist, and when you step inside the gallery, you feel that,” Hannah Rothbard, an artist and curator who’s the director at 81 Leonard Gallery, said. “He is working across textiles, paintings, sculpture, wearable art. It’s like he’s making everything, and you can see his hands in all of it.”
He’s also a performance artist; when you click on his homepage, www.orenfischer.com, you see a thin, black-clad, angular man — presumably Oren — with red shoelaces and his underwear at times sticking up through his pants, flailing and dancing and monkey-walking through Tel Aviv and a Chagall exhibit and what appears to be a hospital. It’s striking.
“He wants you to walk in and be surrounded by this spiritual history, the idea that every Israeli person, every Jewish person holds this history within them,” Ms. Pantirer said. “So much of this work is about Israeli identity and experience.
“There are some biblical references, and there are references to folklore. There’s a Shabbat table, and wooden sculptures that represent both Israelis and terrorists as members of society. He’s critical of the government in one of these pieces, called ‘Mother’s Plight.’ It’s a mother holding a soldier, who is her child, and the soldier is holding a rifle aimed at her womb. So she’s pregnant, but the baby is being killed. It’s the idea of the cycle of violence, and the idea of sacrifice.
“But at the same time, he is Israeli, and he feels the same pain that everyone feels at the loss.”
The exhibit, though, overwhelmingly is “a nuanced view of Israeli society, but also a celebration of culture and joy.”
It’s not about October 7, Ms. Pantirer and Ms. Rothbard said. There is one direct allusion to it. Mr. Fischer, who is 42, lived on a very small kibbutz in the Arava then, and every few days he’d produce a handwritten newsletter highlighting members of the tiny community. “It made people feel like local celebrities,” Ms. Pantirer said. The newsletters — some of them hang in the gallery now — deal with the day and its aftermath.
But it’s not the focus of this show.
It’s not as if the gallery and its leaders shy away from being Jewish, or as if they have ignored October 7. “I am a proud Jew — and these are desperate times,” Ms. Pantirer said in 2024. That was when she and Ms. Rothbard mounted a show called “Artists on Antisemitism.” It was not political, in that it didn’t address politics, but it took on unavoidably political and hate-tinged issues. It took courage to put on such a show, because the atmosphere was so toxic. Even so, though, and even then, as we reported at the time, that show was “about resilience, hope, and the possibility of healing.”
And this exhibit, two years later, goes further.
“There is an overarching spirituality to it, and you want the viewer to come in and feel like they’re in an imaginary temple of sorts,” Ms. Pantirer said. “You’re immersed in color and scale, and the energy around you has been touched by the positivity in the air. As a Jew, it is wonderful to see a show about Israeli artists.”
Hallel means praise. The exhibit isn’t called “Hallel” by accident. “It’s joyous,” Ms. Pantirer said. “It’s in praise of life and love and ancestral wisdom and joy. It’s exploring those things alongside the pain of loss and war and conflict, but it’s about joy.”
Some of it also is funny.
81 Leonard Gallery usually works with local artists. It’s collaborated on “Hallel” with an organization called Havurah, “a collective of young Jewish artists, painters, writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, and creative souls of all kinds in New York City, ushering in a new generation of artistry,” as it says on its website, havurah.art.
“They’re very interested in what they call a Renaissance Jewish esthetic, supporting Jewish artists, and not just the ones who are religious or exploring digital memes,” Ms. Rothbard said. Its founder and executive director, Eitan Gutenmacher, whom she’s known since college, is now studying “the intersection of design and religion” at NYU’s Gallatin school.
The show opened last Sunday. “We brought in klezmer musicians, and it was so fabulous,” Ms. Pantirer said. “It was Joshua Zeitlin and Hebrew Hancock. Everyone was dancing. People were wearing costumes.
“I have never been as happy as I was at that opening. It’s true, I say that at almost every opening, but I really believe that this one was the happiest ever.”
“Hallel” will be open until September 5. Learn more about it at 81leonardgallery.com.