Auction no. 31 Modern and Contemporary Art Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 20:00

painter, born 1936, Tel Aviv. Lives in Tel Aviv. Moshe Gershuni was one of the first artists in Israel to explore highly modernistic , iconoclastic possibilities, at the end of the 1960s, creating works which were paradigms of Conceptual art, and in the 1970s extending his art to public performance. As a stimulating teacher in Bezalel, he fueled the imagination of many young artists, especially towards political involvement. At the Venice Biennale in 1980, Gershuni showed paintings on paper in red lacquer, amidst canals of blood, creating an atmosphere of Holocaust. Immediately afterwards he began a period of painting which stands out as a milestone in Israeli art. Using free scrawl, drip, finger paint, and calligraphy, he suggests personal, Zionist, Moslem and Christian symbols. These works seem to have been created in a trance. His recent silk screens ("Kaddish") are among the finest produced in the country in recent years.