The Back Page and Hezy Leskly

The Room, the Poem, and the World

Standing now outside the room

The poem, and the world

on a stand that is not matter.

Side by side, in distant display.*

"Looking for very large suitcases" was the headline on the back page of the Tel Aviv weekly Ha’ir on Friday, June 2, 1989. The back page, which had previously carried classified ads, adopted a new, playful format that day, centered on a reproduction of an artwork — in the first week, Pnina Reichman’s painting Ural Mountains. No editor was credited, and only a few people knew at the time that it was the work of Hezy Leskly (1952 – 1994), poet, journalist, choreographer, and artist. The page later became known as "The Back Page."

In "The Back Page, " Leskly made two moves: writing comic and satirical texts and selecting a single artwork to be reproduced at the center of the page each week. He shared the work of gathering ads, musings, and quotations — many of them invented — with Modi Bar-On and Yosef El-Dror. In 1991, he handed the editorial content over to Uzi Weil, who kept at it for another ten years and built the section into a favorite with a wide readership. After Leskly, artist Naomi Siman-Tov, who worked at the paper, took over the selection of artworks.

Ha’ir, founded in 1980 as part of the Schocken local press network (among its editors were Hanoch Marmari, Meir Schnitzer, and Gal Uchovsky), quickly became a home for sharp, freewheeling writing on urban, social, and political life. The paper covered local culture and actively shaped it. Leskly contributed a dance criticism column and a personal diary column, "The Grumbler’s Diary."

The weekly artwork in "The Back Page" might look like a minor gesture, but it was quietly bold: it brought contemporary art to a broad general readership; it treated a newspaper page as an exhibition space, giving work that normally lives in galleries and museums a different kind of life; it paired that work with humorous, everyday text; and it drew from a wide, pluralistic range of artists.

The exhibition The Back Page and Hezy Leskly continues something Leskly himself started: in May 1990, he and Nira Itzhaki curated a show at Chelouche Gallery of some 25 works that had appeared in the section’s first year. The current exhibition brings together approximately 100 works from the section alongside some 30 related pieces. Seen at their original scale, side by side, in the physical space of the gallery — and from a distance of nearly three decades — they invite a fresh look at Leskly’s curatorial practice and how it tracked the changes running through local art and culture in the 1990s.

* From: Hezy Leskly, "The Room and the World — A Cycle, " A Well of Milk in the Middle of a City: Collected Poems 1968 – 1992, Am Oved, 2009 [Hebrew].