Jacob Mishori
Born in Israël in 1952.
Israeli · Contemporary Israeli art · figurative and expressive painting informed by a post-minimalist reflection on the medium.
Since the 1970s, Jacob Mishori has occupied a distinctive position in Israeli art, apart from the minimalist orthodoxies then prevailing. A self-taught artist and lecturer in art, he works across painting, drawing, photography, mixed media and installation, sustaining a practice in which the image remains inseparable from a critical reflection on its own means.
His early work frequently engages self-portraiture and sexual identities. Made-up figures, staged bodies, and references to popular culture, rock music and the gloss of magazines form a direct, highly chromatic figurative language in which intimacy confronts artifice.
From the 1990s onward, Mishori extended this enquiry to painting itself. Sensitive and personal compositions alternate with more geometric, detached structures, bringing gesture and control, expressiveness and surface into tension. His watercolours hold a particularly original place in this development: rather than functioning as simple washes, they are worked with concentration and density.
Solo exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art and Braverman Gallery in Tel Aviv, together with presentations at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Berlin Biennale, attest to the continuity of his career. Homme maquillé (1983), the watercolour presented by Swiss Art Gallery, belongs fully to this figurative and intensely chromatic phase within this body of work.
The works by Jacob Mishori presented by Swiss Art Gallery extend this artistic journey and take their place naturally within this corpus.
