Yigal Ozeri: Lizzy

17 September - 11 October 2020

Overview

Born in 1958, Yigal Ozeri is an Israeli artist based in New York City. He is a ‘photo-realist’ painter, in particular of beautiful women in landscapes. A veteran of many international exhibitions, his paintings feature in numerous important collections. This new series focuses upon a single subject, Lizzy Jagger. Ozeri channels his painstaking practice into her sylph-like model, placing her within classically evocative settings. She is his muse.

The paintings are virtuoso displays of rigorously-controlled technique, intended to bring about an appearance of intense and compelling realism. Ozeri pays careful attention to the soft tonalities of the body, the subtleties of drapery, the play of both diffused and focussed light across form and landscape and the rendering of the variegated textures of surface. These are images of someone immediately present; the artist’s meticulously-crafted recreation of a snapshot moment insistently demands our attention.

The painter appears to capture his subject at an outwardly ephemeral and fleeting point in time, nevertheless one that is alluring and sensuous. We detect a pause, the pulse is stilled, motion is suspended and we gaze forensically at the painting (the model sometimes gazes back, with an air of cool regard or counter-interrogation). At this point all kinds of questions and curiosities arise.