OPHRAH SHEMESH
Paintings
April 3 - April 26, 2003
BIOGRAPHY
PRESS RELEASE
This exhibition is the San Francisco debut for OPHRAH SHEMESH, an Israeli-born, New York-based artist. This current series of diminutive paintings, her first done with egg tempera, are psychological studies depicting women and trees in undefined space. Working from live models, Shemesh considers the nakedness of the trees and the women to be "mirrored" from life but appearing as fantasy. By choosing to use egg tempera rather than oil as her medium, Shemesh sacrifices lushness and immediacy in order to achieve intensely worked surfaces which focus on line and pentimento with suggestions of color.
"The frankness of the outward gazes of their protagonists and the frankness of their sexual poses are so arresting that they offer explicit lessons in the relations between looking and desire"-David Freedberg, March 2002.
OPHRAH SHEMESH (b.1952, Haifa, Israel) received her B.F.A. from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and continued her studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. She has been the Painting, Watercolor and Drawing Instructor at the New York Studio School since 1988. Shemesh has had previous solo exhibitions in New York, Boston, Milan, Rome, and Jerusalem.