Ori Reisman 1924-1991

Mordechai Omer describes Ori Reisman's decision to exhibit portraits in the 1970s and 1980s as particularly daring at a time when other Israeli artists were preoccupied with the postmodern crisis. According to Omer, Reisman was "...a role model for those Israeli artists who were unwilling to renounce the perceptual point of departure in their works. The refusal of these artists to integrate into the mainstream that flowed toward abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art, placed them in the status of  "others," not to say anachronistic, in comparison to the canonical trailblazers of art in Israel." (Mordechai Omer in "Ori Reisman: Between Perception and Reduction" Ori Reisman, exhibition catalogue, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2004, page 286). As in the work offered here, his portraits are remarkable in the stormy emotions portrayed with expressive brushstrokes endowing the surface with close sensory contact, combined with a structural language closer, in colors and in concentrated areas, to abstraction and minimalism.