Gili Avissar

Gili Avissar, a multi-disciplinary artist, was born in Haifa, 1980. He lives and works in Tel Aviv. Avissar has earned a B.F.A and M.F.A from the Bezalel Academy. He currently teaches at Hamidrasha School of Art. He has exhibited widely, across Israel and abroad.

In addition to his work in video, sculpture and installation, Avissar has been drawing in ink and oil. The images prevalent in his work are drawn from, among other sources, family albums and distant memories. He filters them through his imagination and processes them in a way that "mutilates" them. The intimate moments, those past photographs that capture the artist's private history, are an integral part of his "image bank." Thus, for example, in Mother on her Wedding Day (2008), his mother's beautiful face has been distorted and now seems to drip across the surface of the paper. The rough brushwork and trailing black paint in Mother / Girl (2008) disturb the outlines of the face, which now somehow seems foreign to the painted figure. The metamorphosis of the human body from death to birth and from birth do death - the body's endless transformation - is awarded a metaphorical expression in these drawings, which employ exaggeration and distortion to translate pain and longing into actual form.

Works by Avissar are kept in collections in Israel and other countries abroad, among them the Ahouvi Collection, Israel, and the Philara Collection,Germany.