YIGAL OZERI
Desire for Anima
Opening: Thursday, November 5 2009 at 7.00 p.m.
Duration of the Exhibition: November 6 to December 22 2009
Galerie Andreas Binder presents Desire for Anima, an exhibition of new oil paintings on paper by Israeli artist Yigal Ozeri. His paintings of young women are unusual for their uncanny realism and psychologically engaging presence. This is achieved by Ozeris using both still photography and video in their initial stages, and painting the final works with thousands of tiny brushstrokes which animate the paintings, surfaces.
This series of paintings explores portraits of young women, either standing together nude in dense grass fields, or posed alone, often wearing a pink diaphanous and lace gown. Many appear like film still, caught, unawares, unselfconsciously laughing, or moving through the lush backgrounds. Others gaze directly at the viewer in a somewhat challenging and unsettling manner. In some, all that is visible are fragments of the girls, body, faces, limbs, richly textured garments. In every painting, Ozeri captures the vulnerability of the girls bodies, at the transitional age between youth and maturity. For the artist, the results of his paintings express his feminine, anima, Carl Jungs concept of the essential woman. This psychological presence is the hidden essence of his work.