Opening Thursday September 10, 2009, 6 � 8pm September 10 � October 24, 2009
Mike Weiss Gallery presents Desire for Anima, an exhibition of new oil paintings on paper by Israeli artist Yigal Ozeri. Using video and camera work in the initial stages of his process, Ozeri embodies the role of film director, choreographer, and painter. The essence of Ozeri�s paintings are the performative and psychological aspects they take on, ultimately breaking through the veils of perception and illusion into raw, tactile reality itself.
In this newest work, Ozeri gives us a series of portraits of young women together or standing alone in lush fields of grass under expansive skies. The girls are presented partially or fully nude, seemingly engrossed within their idyllic surroundings. Their gaze is only ever turned obliquely towards the viewer, yet their vulnerability and fragility is haunting.
There is an uncanny presence in these images, a spirit or charge of the human presence that saturates the pictures, which is revealed by the detail and tiny brushwork in which Ozeri renders these young women. This presence is the hidden essence of his work, and marks Ozeri�s special insight, and psychological atmosphere of his endeavor. Ozeri seeks to touch the anima, Carl Gustav Jung�s concept of the powerful feminine archetype that resides in the unconscious, the driving force underlying all creative potential. The delicate moods that Ozeri achieves are result of this desire, beginning as a dialogue that has the immediacy of a Polaroid, taking place between the artist and model in an interdisciplinary, collaborative environment reminiscent of Warhol�s Factory.
Ozeri responds to today�s demand for high definition media images, but unlike television or video Ozeri�s art concerns the basic philosophical premises of perception and illusion, and uses the resolution of realism to break into a hidden, sensuous reality beneath. In this his new work he recalls Duchamp�s Et�nt Donne; where a carefully staged conceptual installation masquerades as a tromp l�oeil painting. Ozeri�s newest paintings similarly set a complex performative working strategy into the context of realistic figurative painting, yet Ozeri is concerned with the presence of Eros in the natural world, the fragility of our planet; the verdant and elusive feminine space of the anima.
Yigal Ozeri has exhibited extensively throughout Israel, Europe and the United States, and his work can be found in many prominent collections, including Albertina Museum, Vienna; Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Westchester; Kennedy Center for the Arts, Washington DC; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; Scheringa Museum of Realist Art, Netherlands; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; and The Jewish Museum, New York. The artist lives and works in New York City.
For further information please contact Helene Necroto, Director. 212 691 6899
