You are here

Yigal Ozeri | London Stories

Type:

City:

Categories:

Exhibition Type:

How many artists: 
1

How many exhibition works:

Date: 
Thursday, 11 May 2023 to Sunday, 4 June 2023

Pontone Gallery is excited to present a new series of paintings of London by the New York-based artist, Yigal Ozeri. These hyperreal, figurative pictures document contemporary street life. Already established as a critically acclaimed and commercially successful painter of the female figure, Ozeri has latterly switched his focus to a grittier evocation of the cultural landscape. This exhibition continues the theme first explored in last year’s ‘A New York Story’.

Ozeri’s compositions reference the casual snapshot, the artful arrangements of editorial photography and the apparent randomness of ‘cinema verité’. People and objects are cropped, partly obscured and fragmented to deliver an impression of fast-moving, undifferentiated urban life. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is deliberate, carefully chosen and meticulously edited image-making. The paintings are rendered in the artist’s trademark painstaking technique. At first sight they appear to be photographs; closer inspection reveals them to be painted. There is a dynamic tension between the ostensibly arbitrary content and its deliberate execution. The subjects of the paintings have had huge attention lavished on them - they are not simply picturesque, but are significant. The painter is telling a story.

Ozeri’s story evokes his own experience of coming to the big city from Israel to make his mark. He alludes to city life in its multiplicity of manifestations. We see the pace, dislocation and energy of contemporary coexistence with its’ wealth of difference - differences that are graphically signalled by its citizens, the majority of which are caught communing with their mobile telephones.

Is this an alienated, self-absorbed population, atomised in its own bubble of narcissism? Or is this a city of people finding new ways to make connections? In this respect, Ozeri’s London is not so dissimilar from the boiling melting-pot of New York.

Artist:

Telephone: 
020 7730 8777
Venue ( Address ): 

Pontone Gallery,

74 Newman Street,

London,

W1T 3DB

Pontone Gallery , London

Other events from Pontone Gallery

view
Tim Wright: Featured Works | Cast
11/18/2023 to 12/23/2023
view
Chris Rivers: Featured Works | Expendable Youth
11/18/2023 to 12/23/2023
view
Timothy Spall | Winter Sun
11/18/2023 to 02/03/2024
view
Angela Glajcar | Vital Materiality
10/13/2023 to 11/12/2023

Pages

Related Shows This Week in UK

view
Street Life
03/01/2024 to 05/18/2024
view
Philip Muñoz | Of Land, Sea and Sky
03/15/2024 to 04/20/2024
view
Tim Noble & Sue Webster: Love and Hate at Firstsite
11/09/2023 to 12/31/2024
view
Food as Medicine
03/18/2024 to 04/12/2024
view
The Dark and the Light
03/06/2024 to 03/31/2024
view
Harold Cohen: Refactoring (1966-74)
03/08/2024 to 05/11/2024
view
HOMAGE TO QUAN AM BY MARIA THAN
03/28/2024 to 05/19/2024
view
Lucy Harwood: Bold Impressions
12/02/2023 to 04/14/2024

Pages