The Romantic Trail and The Concrete House

The book accompnied Sharon Yaari's first solo show in Germany at Haus Esters, Kunstmuseum Krefeld.

Built by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the late nineteen twenties, Haus Esters and Haus Lange are two of the most iconic structures of modernist architecture in Germany and can be associated with notions of an open, forward-looking society. The special atmosphere and architecture of these former private homes have regularly inspired artists since being repurposed as exhibition venues for contemporary art.

Sharon Ya’ari built on this site-specific tradition to the extent that he developed new works and series for Haus Esters based on the reality of his own life. The starting point of Ya’ari’s photographic exploration was the connection between the ideas of European modernism between the World Wars and the effort to implement them in the young State of Israel. Sharon Ya’ari traced the legacy of modernist formal language in his native country. He was not concerned with the perspective of architectural photography but rather with marginalia, the relics of everyday life, the fragile relationships between human beings and the elements of their environment. Modernist utopias overlapped with the history of its breaks and the conflictual reality of everyday life. The search for the traces of modernism’s great visions thus became a mirror of human living conditions.