Yigal Ozeri

Yigal Ozeri (; born 1958) is an Israeli artist based in New York City. He is known for large-scale cinematic portraits of young women in landscapes. As one of the leading Photorealism painters, his large-scale oil paintings tend to capture ethereal scenes of women in nature. His son is Adam Ozeri, a professional soccer player.

Biography Yigal Ozeri was born in Israel in 1958. He currently lives and works in New York City.

In 1997, Ozeri collaborated with Israeli poet Ronny Someck to produce The Razor that Cut the Metaphoric Face of Poetry which included five etchings by Ozeri, and five ensuring poems by Someck. Ozeri's etchings, in order, were titled Pointed Tower, Tears of Buildings, Unbuilt Pagoda, Dirty Laundry, and Tears of Buildings II. The book itself was produced by The Cabri Print Workshop, based out of Kibbutz Cabri in the Western Galilee.

In 2014, he co-founded Mana Contemporary where he has a studio in the flagship, located in Jersey City.

Influences

Originally an abstract painter, Ozer has developed a unique style of Photorealist painting since embracing realism in early 2000. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite works of the 1850s, his paintings possess a romantic sensibility not captured in works by the other Photorealists. He specifically cites Pre-Raphaelite painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais as inspirations, in both process and product.

A catalyst for his shift towards Photorealism has been largely accredited as well to Spanish Baroque painters. His encounter with Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656) spurred his shift towards an exact representation, as Ozeri modernizes such traditional keystones of the art canon through technological mediums, shifting the visual aperture to that of the digitized depth of field. Velázquez's visual demarcations in his paintings suggest, in fact, the employment of the camera obscura, which assisted in achieving an exaggerated perspective and depth of field.

As a member of a generation of younger painters concerned with representation, he draws upon contemporaries such as Chuck Close, Gerhard Richter, and Andrew Wyeth.

Style and technique According to the Knoxville Museum of Art's curator Steven Wicks, Ozeri's compositions "probe the boundaries between painting and photography within the context of the Digital Age." Ozeri photographs his subjects, often strikingly beautiful women in nature. These figures evoke the aestheticism of late Romanticism subgenre––nineteenth-century melancholia associated with the ends of the pastoral and the rise of the urban. As these women wander throughout beautiful landscapes, their gaze turns inwards and pensive, adding a psychological layering of intimate experiences with the natural world––away from the screen-based––while hinting at the presence of boundless psychological landscapes.

While photographing his subjects, Ozeri supplies himself with multiple already-made images from which to choose. Photorealism in the Digital Age, Mana Contemporary, Chicago, Illinois

2017 The Storm, Zemack Gallery for Contemporary Art. Tel Aviv.

2018 Yigal Ozeri: A New York Story, Louis K. Meisel Gallery. New York City. Personification, IMAGO Galleries, Palm Desert, CA Reflection, Whitestone Gallery, Tokyo, Japan In Pursuit of the Real, Cermak Eisenkraft Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic A New York Story, Galerie Andrea Binder, Munich, Germany

2019

Reality Check, Zemack Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv, Israel A New York Story, Rutger Brandt Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands

2020

Yigal Ozeri, Flint Institute of Art, Flint, MI Liberated Paper, Galerie Edition Raphael, Frankfurt, Germany

2024 Photorealism: Yigal Ozeri, Lilienthal Gallery, Knoxville, TN.

Collections Yigal Ozeri's art are in permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, the Jewish Museum of New York, The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Albertina and other public institutions. A few select paintings were recently acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.