Sophie Jungreis

STONE OF FLESH AND BLOOD

Sophie Jungreis completed her studies in the Kalisher High Institution of Painting in 1977. After 25 years a as a painter she turned to sculpting as a result of a long spiritual-therapeutic road, an innermost journey that led her into the core of hard stone towards self-fulfilment.

Her stone-made sculptures are distinctly feminine. She managed to dissolve the rigidity of stone, to inundate it with tenderness and bring forth a representing expression of her quest of inner balance between masculinity and femininity, both inherent deep in her soul. The groping intuitive quest came to a harbor in the stone sculptures, in which she masterly carves her personal view and her inner cravings.

Cast in all the sculpted lying women is the image of Jungreis’ mother, a holocaust survivor who was given to depression all her life. Since childhood Sophie remembers her mother as a crouching figure, and a large cluster of sculptures are based on that crouching position. Yet out of that prostration further elements began to come forth, such as awakening animal urges, desiring to be caressed, sexually stirred, inviting, submissive and seductive. Mentally shaking off the realm of shadows that had encompassed her since childhood became the founding stage towards a new self building. Yearning for exalted feelings, formerly restrained and banned, now guided her to redemption, and to explore the suppressed sentiment: “slowly pass long painful days / slowly blind suppressed layers are brought to light / I cling to the hard stone / looking for love” (Jungreis). Just simply now she removes the death cloak that has overclouded her entire being and votes for life: “the stone is mother, petrified and cold / it is also those petrified layers within me / I am outside the circle, wanting in / wanting life, not death" (Jungreis).

Each and every layer shed by the observer’s eye strikes rich the latent content in Sophie Jungreis’ stone sculptures. We witness an inexhaustible content of drive, emotion and erotic urge that had been hidden within her so many years and all at once erupted and broke through every fortified wall, every dam, every inhibition and blockade, just as pronounced in the poem “Corona” by Paul Celan, which ends with an appeal:

“Time has arrived to realize!
Time has arrived for the stone to bloom
For unrest to thrill
Time has arrived for time to arrive
Time has arrived”.

Celan’s lover, the poetess Ingburg Bachman, reacted in 1949 to his poem: “Again and again I say to myself that ‘Corona’ is the most beautiful among your poems. A perfect anticipatory statement introducing a moment in which everything turns to marble and becomes everlasting”. This exactly is the sensation we get straight from the innards of the solid stone sculptures, be it dark Arad, pink Mitzpa, grey basalt or white Jerusalem stone. A whole wide world is embodied in these stone-made animal females: provocation and submission, seduction and rejection, wooing and willingness, hardness and tenderness, laying bare and laying veiled, and then femininity and masculinity entwined.

Awareness to “the feminine presence” or to “feminine art” arose in Israel in the 1970’ and marked the beginning of the feminist era in Israeli art. Most eminent artists of the trend then were women who “came back to painting”, still some clung to other media as their artistic language. However, Sophie Jungreis’ feminist presentation is totally different from the conceptual one prevailing then. Hers is earthly, erotic, primordial, and doesn’t apologize for using primary organic formations and primeval matter, as bodily art, so to speak, is naturally and directly copied and shifted in a lump of stone. The stone plays for her a role of a voodoo puppet, projecting with each touch of the chisel everything that takes place inside her. Under her skilled hands the sensual stone-made works turn into quivering and throbbing flesh, and reverberate primeval and unalloyed female essence. With her the stone also blooms, and the blooming marble will last.

Article written by Chana Koffler
Translated from Hebrew to English by Eyal Levin

The earth the trees the skies are
made of browns reds
linked to stability to the
essences
Sophie Jungreis sees an
alien landscape of the one which
is on the margins of
annihilation
Daughter of survivors an
Israeli she grasps earth
as a continous abdomen
ready to swallow warm corpses
of victims
of heroes
They fall in her dedicated
self destroying in the womb
Earth grows stones of tombs
shadows of ghostly trees
As a cluster they resemble
units they differ
Sprouting upright
curves in oppression
sometimes a cross pops out
signal of what had been
the non resurrected
a signal to the comers
destined to go
Universe replenishes with
trees gathering towards
the end of canvases
threatening to take over
places consecrated to heavens
Everything here floats in
limbo waiting in between
Colouring the darks with
nunces as a system of small lights leaping forth
through the screens
An expressive restrained elegy
Lyricism as a paradox

Dorit Kedar

The Sacred Feminine (the feminine principle) symbolizes the spiritual transformation and rebirth of humanity on its path to knowledge, awareness and enlightenment. The pubic triangle or vulva was a primary life symbol of the Goddess culture and was found both in caves and graves as early as 26,000 B.C. and even earlier.

The image served as a sign or symbol of the female processes of nature. Nature and Goddess (the feminine principle) were analogous. The abstracted vulva appeared not as an anatomic "sexual" organ but as a generalized symbol of renewal, periodicity, birth and rebirth.

To better understand the archetypal forces that work in all of us, we must turn to the roots of humanity, where the sacred feminine in all its manifestations brings us closer to the magical and mythical depth of our nature, uniting our spirit with our human roots.

In searching for my identity, I have come across this symbol connecting me to the primordial depth of my experience.

Sophie Jungreis

“With blessings from heaven above,
Blessings of the deep that couches,
Beneath, blessings of the breast and the womb.”

(Genesis 49, 25)

The drawings attempt to unearth the essence of the words. The search for this essence leads to the source, to the universal. This is a search for primordial, organic forms, grasped intuitively; a path associated with feminine thought processes, which connect with the ancient goddess Ashera. Goddess of earth and nature, Ashera symbolizes the spiritual transformation and rebirth of man on his path to knowledge, awareness, and enlightenment.

Sophie Jungreis

Building an Identity

For years I’ve been influenced by outward expressions of the death instinct as manifested in those beings through whom I lived, dead people, whose dead spirit nourished me. My soul yearned for the light, but I remained in darkness.

My work is an attempt to create life within me. It is a yearning for and a creation of a SELF that was not spawned by a natural process.

I was born into a the dead world in which human spirits wander, a family of six million dead, whom I embraced.

Eugene O’Neils’s words convey my feelings:
”Man is born broken.
He lives by mending.
The grace of god is glue.”

The stone is my mother, petrified and cold. It is also those petrified layers within me. I am outside the circle, wanting in, wanting life, not death."

Sophie Jungreis

בונה זהות

שנים חייתי את גילוייו החיצוניים של המוות
אצל אנשים מתים, שמרוחם המתה ניתנו לי החיים.
נפשי השתוקקה אל האור, אך נותרתי בחושך.
לא יכולתי להתנתק ממטען המוות.
עבודותיי הן ניסיון לבנות חיים בתוכי.
הן כמיהה ובריאה של זהות עצמית שלא נוצרה כדבר מובן מאליו.
שנולדה לתוך עולם מת שבו רוחות אדם סובבות
ואתן המשפחה -- 6 מליון מתים.
עליהן התרפקתי, מהן קיבלתי את החום ואהבה לה נזקקתי.

דבריו של יוג'ין אונייל מתארים את חיי ואת עבודתי:
"אדם נולד שבור
חייו הם תיקון
חסד אלוהים הוא איחוי"
האבן היא אמא, מאובנת וקרה.
היא גם השכבות המאובנות בתוכי.
אני מחוץ למעגל, רוצה פנימה
רוצה חיים ולא מתים.

סופי יונגרייז

A MULTIMEDIA PERFORMNCE OF SCULPTURE, DANCE, SOUND, MUSIC, AND TEXT

Rachel Sukman

It was one of those particularly hot summer evenings in June 2019. In Sophie Jungreis’ sculpture garden, in her home at the American Colony in Jaffa, magical lights illuminated the stone and marble sculptures, which the artist has created since the year 2000, with bright light. The performance for which we came swept us into a dialogue between a pair of dancers and the nude sculptures like a rousing tango. A couple - a man and a woman - engage in a passionate affair with Jungreis’ stone sculptures, and the sculptures, on their part, comply with the human courtship. The sky is dominated by red, purple and blue lights, drawing the viewers into the depths of the intimate gestures. The soft, smooth skin pleats of the female sculptures seem to yield to the colorful rays of light, moving back and forth in keeping with the motion of the changing light. The rough-skinned sculptures of men, in contrast, which were modelled with a steel chisel, are bathed in soft blue light. Romantic songs and tunes from the 1960s are heard in the background, accompanied by vocal, at times even operatic singing, which conjured up the memory of a long gone youth. The rhythm binds the ostensibly inanimate sculptures together, making them dance and installing them with life. The harmonious movements of the dancers, as they flirt with the sculptures’ naked bodies, animate the latter, and it is no longer clear who is lifeless and who is alive, breathing and revealing in the encounter.

The audience is enchanted and still, praying for the show to go on. People stand hugging, watching the sensual turbulence. The performance ends with the dancers going out into the street as the music carries on…

Experimental performances of visual art are rare here and intended for an audience who enjoys enigmatic adventures.

Sophie Jungreis, stone and marble sculptures, 2000 - 2019

Sophie Jungreis’ Sculpture Garden, Jaffa

Photos: Motti Azuelos