Gideon Ofrat

Gideon Ofrat (Hebrew: גדעון עפרת; born in 1945) is a leading Israeli art historian, art curator and art critic, who specializes in Israeli art. He has curated numerous exhibitions in museums and galleries and written numerous articles, catalogs, and books in the field of Israeli art, the theory of aesthetics, and general philosophy.

Biography Ofrat was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 by the name Gideon Fridlander. He received his bachelor's degree in 1968 from Tel Aviv University, and his master's degree in 1970 from Tel Aviv University (including a year at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island). In 1974 he completed a doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The subject of the doctoral dissertation was "The Definition of Art (in Hebrew: הגדרת האמנות" and it was later published as a book by the same name, by HaKibbutz Hameuchad.

Between 1970 and 1981 he taught modern drama in the Department of Theater at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and from 1972 to 1995 he was a senior lecturer of philosophy at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. He has also been a guest lecturer on Israeli art at various institutions in Israel, the US and Canada.

In 1976 and 1979, he curated the first performance festivals in Israel: "Exhibit 76" and "Exhibit 79", at the Artists' House in Tel Aviv, and even coined the Hebrew term for performance art (Meitzag) and for installation art (Meitzav). From 1993 to 1995, Ofrat curated the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where he presented, among other things, Avital Geva's unique greenhouse project.

In 1993–1994 he was an art lecturer at the University of Haifa, and from 1998 to 2000 he was a lecturer of philosophy and art at the Alma House of Hebrew Culture College and at the Open University of Tel Aviv. From 2001 to 2000 he was a lecturer in the fields of philosophy and cinema at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and a visiting professor at the Yeshiva University in New York. From 2002 to 2005, he served as artistic director and chief curator of "Time for Art", an exhibition space in Tel Aviv. He was the curator (together with Galia Bar-Or) of the exhibition "Hegemony and Multiplicity – The 1950s in Israeli Art" at Ein Harod museum.

Awards

Ofrat is the winner of the Curator Award for 2009 on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of Culture. In 2013, he was awarded the Yakir Bezalel award. In 2015, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for research on the history of Israel and its settlement on behalf of Yad Ben-Zvi.