Yossi Mark to Recieve Israel Ministry of Culture and Sport Award in the Visual Arts

2010

Yossi Mark, born in Israel 1954, studied philosophy and social studies in Tel Aviv University, and graduated the Avni institue for art in Tel Aviv. Along side his solo exhibitions at Chelouche Gallery in 1993, 2002 and 2008, Mark exhibited in the Tel Aviv Museum, the Petach Tikva Museum, the Israeli pavilion in Paris, the West Bloomfield Detroit and the University of Michigan.

Noon, 2010, oil on plywood, 61X43 cm

Mark’s is a unique realism that ignores the tactility of the outer surfaces, and does not idealize what is. Through crystal clear observation,silently detached from the hustle of convention, his paintings depict a near casual, common reality. With lucidity as close as feasible to the direct experience, free from constraints of time and space, albeit very precise about time and space. His art is endowed with Haiku qualities, saturated with the beauty of simplicity, of the ordinary, of the sadness which accompanies the knowledge of the inevitable ephemeralness.

(from “Wall, Bed and Slippers”, by Drorit Gur Arie)

Morning, 2010, oil on plywood, 48X51 cm

Mark’s oevre centers the monomentality of the intimate and touches substantial human conditions. The figures that he shows us exposed in their natural expression whithin rooms, and their relation to the space around them, invites the spectator to encounter graceful moments of reflection in ordinary exsistence. His works move from the emotional to the contemplative, from the analitical to the poetical and from visual simplicity to emotional complexity. His paintings that lean on prolonged, slow, focused and direct observation build a soft, quiet, introvert essense that asks for inner attentiveness.