Ori Reisman

Moshe Bar Yore (purchased directly from the artist in 1982)
Purchased by the previous owner from the above
Sale: Sotheby's Tel Aviv, October 31, 2002, Lot. 157
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Ori Reisman: A Retrospective, October 2004-January 2005, no. 35, illustrated in color in the exhibition catalogue

Canvas is unlined. Some craquelure in green and yellow pigments. Minor frame abrasions and exposed canvas at extreme edges. Under ultraviolet light large spots of repaint throughout green and yellow pigments.
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"Ori Reisman of Kibbutz Kabri in Western Galilee got his specialized training at the Academy of Beaux Art in Paris in the fifties. Skirting an abbreviated lyrical abstract, his colorist paintings (tending to red-green matchings) depicted landscapes and figures, fusing nature and sensuality. His intuitively 'warm' brush frequently blended hills and nudity . An unconscious kinship with the semi-abstract paintings of the American artist Milton Avery characterizes the minimalism and the tension of contrasts and balances on the broad, flat-colored surfaces. A lyrical-abstract residue from the seminars Zaritsky and his colleagues conducted in the kibbutzim in the late forties was converted by Reisman into uniform-color surfaces (as he had learned from his Parisian teacher, Jean Souverbie), which he applied to positions of man and nature. A humanized nature and a poetical relationship between man and universe are seen in landscapes of fields and in earth-sky depictions. Reisman took part in Group of Ten exhibitions in the fifties and those of Climate in the seventies; he always steered a middle course between autonomous, concise color values and an affection for the local light and landscape, suffused with sincerity and empathy." (Gideon Ofrat, One Hundred Years of Art in Israel, Canada, 1998, p. 294-295).

While presenting this work to the original owner, Ori Reisman titled it "Walls of Jerusalem" explaining also that as this was a special work and in honor of Jerusalem, he decided to sign it with his full name (first and last), and not only his first name.