Yigal Ozeri: In Search of Beauty: 225 W 17th St, New York

Ethan Cohen Gallery is pleased to present In Search of Beauty, a solo exhibition of Yigal Ozeri bringing together nearly two decades of paintings primarily from the artist’s celebrated Women in Nature series. On view from September 24 through October 31, 2026, the exhibition follows two major presentations of Ozeri’s work organized by Ethan Cohen Gallery in 2025 and returns to the body of work for which the artist first became internationally recognized. 

For nearly twenty years, Ozeri has painted women outdoors: immersed in water, reclining beside lakes, standing in fields and forests, caught in the transient light of an open landscape, or moving through the streets of the city. The premise is deceptively simple. Yet across these paintings, nature is never merely a setting and portraiture is never simply descriptive. Figure and landscape continually act upon one another. Hair moves with wind and water; skin takes on the temperature of surrounding light; reflections fracture the solidity of bodies. At times the women appear intensely present. At others, they seem on the verge of disappearing into the world around them. 

The exhibition begins with paintings including Untitled (Priscilla in Water) (2007) and Untitled (Jana and Adam in the Park) (2009), works from a formative period in Ozeri’s development of this language. In Priscilla in Water, a figure enters a dark, reflective body of water, her face almost entirely obscured by wet hair. The image refuses the directness normally associated with portraiture. We encounter a body through movement, reflection, and surface rather than through identity alone. Two years later, Jana and Adam in the Park expands this vocabulary. Conceived by Ozeri as an ode to Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the painting marks the first appearance of a male figure alongside a woman in the series. Seated at the edge of a wooded lake amid folds of pale fabric, the pair recalls Manet’s collision of the pastoral tradition with contemporary life, but Ozeri translates that art-historical reference through the immediacy of photography and his own heightened naturalism. The result is neither a reenactment nor a simple homage, but a contemporary reworking of the pastoral encounter and an early indication of Ozeri’s interest in placing photographic experience into conversation with the history of painting. Together, these works establish concerns that Ozeri continues to revisit almost two decades later.  

Photography is essential to this ambiguity. Ozeri begins with photographic images but uses painting to disturb their apparent certainty. Rather than treating the photograph as an endpoint to be copied, he alters focus, light, atmosphere, and emphasis as he translates an image into paint. His surfaces are built through successive layers of oil, allowing passages of extraordinary precision to coexist with areas that dissolve or soften. The process allows the instantaneous nature of photography to be slowed down through painting, introducing duration, memory, and psychological presence into an image that might otherwise appear fixed. Earlier writing on Ozeri’s process similarly describes his manipulation of the photographic source through changes in focus, light, and atmosphere.  

That tension becomes especially apparent in Untitled (Aquabella) (2011), Untitled (Territory) (2013), and the diptych Untitled (Marcela) (2016). Water recurs throughout these paintings as both physical environment and psychological device. Its reflective surface complicates the apparent realism of the image, turning bodies and landscapes into unstable fields of color and light. In Territory, a woman lies almost weightlessly amid rushing water, her floral clothing dissolving into the movement around her. In Marcela, Ozeri separates landscape and figure across two panels: one presents the terrain and water seemingly on their own, while the other shows a woman looking out across that same landscape. The diptych makes explicit a relationship present throughout the series. We are looking at the woman, but she is also looking. She possesses a field of vision beyond our own.  

Ozeri’s paintings have often been described through their relationship to Romanticism and the Pre-Raphaelites, a lineage visible in their heightened color, luxuriant natural settings, and fascination with beauty. Yet his engagement with art history is not merely atmospheric. As Jana and Adam in the Park makes explicit, Ozeri also consciously revisits established pictorial traditions, translating them through photography and contemporary experience. His women can appear almost mythic within their environments, while the photographic origins of the paintings continually pull them back toward the present. A stray expression, a wet strand of hair, the particular fall of clothing, or the unguarded posture of a body interrupts the possibility of pure allegory. The paintings move between an older pictorial language of the muse and something closer to a contemporary encounter between artist, subject, camera, and viewer. 

This relationship inevitably brings with it the question of looking. Ozeri’s paintings are unabashedly invested in beauty, but they also reveal how unstable beauty becomes under sustained attention. The women pictured are sometimes aware of the viewer and sometimes absorbed elsewhere. Some meet our gaze; others turn away, close their eyes, or disappear into the landscape. Their sensuality is present, but so too is their distance. The paintings therefore occupy a space between intimacy and unknowability. However meticulously Ozeri renders a face or body, the person pictured is never completely available to us. 

That distinction becomes particularly compelling in the newest works in the exhibition. In Zuzanna (2024), the figure turns toward us in monochrome, reducing the landscape to a blurred field behind her. Two paintings titled Zuzanna from 2026 move between radically different states: one brings the sitter close to the picture plane, illuminated against deep green; another places her within moving water, eyes closed, her floral dress and body caught amid currents of white foam. Olya (2026), by contrast, strips away much of the natural abundance traditionally associated with the series. Against an expansive blue sky, the sitter appears almost elemental, her face turned downward as wind catches her hair. These recent works retain the beauty and cinematic intensity associated with Ozeri’s practice while becoming quieter and psychologically more concentrated.  

Two paintings set within the city extend these concerns beyond the natural landscape. Here, architecture, and the visual noise of the street replace water, foliage, and open sky. Yet the central tension remains: the figure is vividly present while retaining a private interiority. 

Seen together, the paintings reveal Women in Nature not as a fixed series but as a question Ozeri has continued to approach from different directions. What begins as an encounter between the human figure and the natural world becomes an investigation into the act of seeing itself: what photography captures, what painting changes, what beauty invites us to project, and what remains inaccessible in another person. Ozeri’s technical precision makes his subjects extraordinarily visible. His paintings endure because visibility, in the end, does not make them entirely knowable. 

Yigal Ozeri’s paintings have been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Closely associated with contemporary photorealism, Ozeri has nevertheless consistently pushed beyond the faithful reproduction of photographic sources toward a more atmospheric and psychologically charged form of realism. His work has been presented alongside major figures associated with Photorealism and has been included in international museum exhibitions devoted to the movement. His practice is informed not only by photography but by the history of painting, with Ozeri citing European masters including Velázquez among his influences.  

Ozeri’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; The Jewish Museum, New York; The New York Public Library; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Albertina, Vienna, among others. 

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 AM to 6 PM. 

Press Contacts: 

Lara Kamhi: lara@ecfa.com 
Sacha Cohen: sacha@ecfa.com 
Shear Mizrahi: ozeripr@gmail.com