Uri Lifshitz (1936, Kibbutz GivatHashlosha, Israel – 2011, Tel-Aviv Israel)

Uri Lifshitz is among the greatest artists of Israeli painting, the appreciation of whose works has been clouded in his final years by extra-artistic affairs. A large-scale exhibition of his work staged at Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016 may serve as a point of departure for reevaluation of the work of an artist who was among the most sophisticated, expressive, and virtuoso masters of Israeli painting. Born in 1936, he was able to participate in the last New Horizons exhibition. His artistic oeuvre marks aparting with the lyrical abstract, with painting which turns to the collective, toward figurative, personal painting. In this sense he is close to other artists born in the 1930s, such as Moshe Gershuni and Igael Tumarkin.His best-known series include The Schizophrenics—one of the most beautiful series ever created in Israeli painting, whose free, wild expression,which nevertheless struggles for its cohesion, epitomizes the unity of language and content, and Mr. Rabinowitz—the nondescript clerk who carries the burden of life, offering a metaphor for Israeliness. In his last years, Lifshitz explored the concept of the "index"—art applied to reality like an objective measure.

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