Project on Contemporary Spiritual Art & Artistic Interpretation of the Old Testament , from 2010 onward
FOREFATHERS project on contemporary Biblical art and artistic interpretation of the Old Testament was conceived by Michael Rogatchi after he has completed two different series of works featuring central Biblical figures, the collections called The Patriarchs and The Matriarchs. On The Patriarchs, Michael was working from the late 1990s completing the series by 2004, and on The Matriarchs, the artist worked in the end of 2000s, from 2008 to 2010.
The Patriarchs & the Matriarchs together has formed a core-exhibition for Forefathers project, with addition of more works elaborating on the theme of the contemporary Biblical art.
The particularity of Forefathers project is based on the fact of its rarity. There are very few contemporary artists working today who are concentrating on the theme, and those who are, are producing rather standard illustrative mass-production images which does not add productively to the modern-time artistic and inspired and supported by art dialogue on Biblical theme.
Yet less there is an modern-time’ artistic input into the theological, philosophical and historical education and the other intellectual efforts.
From these crucial points of view, existence of such project as our ongoing Forefathers is authentically artistic, intellectually charged and originally executed unique material which evokes a lot of interest and brings out special knowledge, as well as stimulates wide interest into the matter of fundamental moral values and rich history of mankind.
The material coming from Forefathers is based on original images created by Michael Rogatchi, most fascinating artist’s stories and narrative explaining the origin of his impressive images in modern Biblical art, as well as Michael’s own research and its outcome in the field of the Biblical history.
The combination of exquisite modern art with deep historical and theological knowledge is not an usual phenomenon among the contemporary artists. This might explain a very high interest towards Forefathers projects in many countries and among versified audiences.
Combining artistic and educational elements, Forefather collection and project include exhibitions, Artist Talks, special Artist Lectures, several art publications of smaller and bigger brochures and a book, creation and release of special DVD presenting the collection, master-classes, various media-publications.
These activities were conducted in Jerusalem ( 2014 and 2015), London, the UK ( 2010 and 2016), Turku and Helsinki, Finland ( 2011, 2014 and 2017) , Washington, D.C., New York and Los-Angeles ( 2013), Vilnius, Lithuania ( 2013-2014), Tallinn, Estonia ( 2014), and the other places.
The new exhibitions , lectures, master-classes of Forefathers projects are planned from 2021 onward.
Forefathers is the core material for the forthcoming art documentary on Michael Rogatchi’s contemporary Biblical art.
The new art book on Forefathers will be published together with the release of the documentary.