Watch the beautiful video of Yossi Mark’s ‘Silent Dialogue’, exhibition at Chelouche Gallery, 2024.
Curator: Drorit Gur Arie
Yossi Mark’s painterly practice is distinguished by an acute visual analysis whereby he studies and formulates the reality in front of him. His devotion to a systematic examination of the observed subject results in direct intimate contact between artist and image, and between image and viewer. Mark relies on facts to distill a reality, but he is not captive to them. His emphasis on the formal, morphological, and tectonic, as well as on the restrained, arid coloration which deliberately avoids the purely illusory, offers a laconic, ascetic, focused language.
Mark continues his exploration into aging and decay, looking into mind-body relations and revealing how withering is embodied in the flesh. The discourse of ageism and the veneration of youth in contemporary Western culture have led to a reduction in the representation of old age in our visual landscape, including depictions of old women. The manifestations of female aging in the art of the past were often perceived as deviating from the human to the quasi-human, ugly, and grotesque. Mark’s focus on aging, on the other hand, is personal; a closeness that turns his paintings into a sensitive human document about the life force slowly draining away.
The attention to the mental and emotional aspects points to a grave, often grim, reality, in an unsentimental manner; a reality that hints at the inevitable presence of the tragic, which penetrates the intimate space in general, and the Israeli one in particular.
Yossi Mark, Born in Israel (1954), Among the most prominent realist painters in Israel, studied philosophy and social studies at Tel Aviv University and graduated from The Avni Institute of Fine Arts in Tel Aviv. He was awarded the Israel Ministry of Culture and Sports Award in the Visual Arts (2010) and the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sports Award in the Visual Arts (2017). Mark had solo exhibitions at Chelouche Gallery (2015, 2008, 2002,1993), and exhibited in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat-Gan, the Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Ashdod Art Museum, Uri and Rami Nechushtan Museum, Ashdot Ya’akov, the Israeli pavilion in Paris, the West Bloomfield Museum of Art Detroit and the University of Michigan.
Video: Daniel Hanoch
