Emerging alongside the artistic renaissance of his native country, Israeli artist Yuval Wolfson, born in 1966, possesses both the technical edge of a printmaker and the virtue of a painter. As a result, Wolfson not only arrests our understanding of identity, he projects it in representation.
Wolfson’s talent was discovered at an early age when he was granted a scholarship from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His work demonstrates the rare and unique quality sought by many artists: the ability to catch, with gentle and sensitive brush strokes, the changing seasons, their vivid hues, and the declining light of each day.
Wolfson’s artwork personifies the inner-world of emotion, reflection, and consciousness through three central visual motifs: flightless birds, automobiles, and fragmented landscapes.
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Redefining Portraiture
As the precursor to photography, portraiture evolved to perfectly replicate the appearance of a subject. In Wolfson’s body of work, however, a portrait has symbolic potential. Instead of illustrating an individual’s likeness, the artist uses peacocks, chickens, cars, still life, and landscapes to visualize the complexity of human emotion. Flightless birds personify romance and relationships, vintage automobiles examine progress, and landscapes express “changing feelings and changing moods,” he says.
By repeatedly depicting only a number of motifs in his work, Wolfson poignantly sheds light on the inevitability of change—nothing stays the same, not even in representation.
“I mainly reflect what is inside. The outside is not real to me anymore; [it] is a reflection of what is happening inside myself,” he explained in an interview with Park West.
Away from Black and White
Wolfson exclusively used black and white pigment to create his artwork until he was 18 years old. The renowned Impressionist, Claude Monet, played a pivotal role in Wolfson’s arrival to color and the virtue it signified.
In his first one-person exhibition, “Monet’s Garden”, his painterly qualities were reviewed with much acclaim by the critics. He created 24 variations of one image where the colors differed gradually according to the declining sunlight – hour by hour. Wolfson divides his time between painting and teaching and is also an accomplished serigrapher.
