Yigal Ozeri: The Art World: 225 West 17th Street, NY

 New York — Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present Yigal Ozeri: The Art World, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition offers an extravaganza of portraits depicting figures in the art world — the famous and the personally influential to Ozeri. Throughout the show, we are essentially eavesdropping on Ozeri’s perceptual dance with other artists, their place in the art pantheon, and Ozeri’s perception of his.

Photorealism and Realism are two genres separated by a common language, that of figuration. Yigal Ozeri’s work sets out to exist from a fusion greater than the sum of its parts. To grasp the ambition of his undertaking one must remember that photorealism emerged in the late 60s and 70s as devotion to the photographic image rather than the subject depicted. Indeed the photograph was the depicted subject — to be reproduced exactly in painting down to the trivial of detail. As such, the practice celebrated its shortcomings: the flat two-dimensionality, the unbreakable frame of the captured nanosecond, the fleeting instant of time and light.

Ozeri sets out to dissolve the limits of photorealism in order to deepen our relationship with the portrait being reproduced. His icon is the human rather than the photograph. He re-infuses depth and perspective — facets deliberately renounced by the genre’s practitioners as they stay narrowly true to the exposed glimpse. His brush strives to revitalize the natural subject and make it psychologically tactile and three-dimensional, liberating it from the confines of the frozen image. And so to call Ozeri a photorealist is misleading. His humanist preoccupations, in effect his moral esthetic, drive him to a wider horizon.

Abramović, Warhol, Kusama, Richter, Botero, Ai Weiwei and the like set the frame of iconic historicity. They are society’s canonized, their images incessantly over-familiar, elevated beyond their work to brand ubiquity. The works embody Ozeri’s relation to the portrait, the subject’s relation to the art world, and the painting’s relation to the photo. These images reveal Ozeri’s sense, which inhabits several overlapping continuums as he works, certainly the art historical and the art world community. Onlookers find themselves similarly voyeuristic, gazing through layers of narrative and memory. The Art World situates us in the realized sphere of reputation and achievement, presenting portraits that reflect both the communal canon of artistic legacy and Ozeri’s personal journey within it.

Press Contacts: 

Shear Mizrahi: ozeripr@gmail.com

Lara Kamhi: lara@ecfa.com

Sacha Cohen: sacha@ecfa.com