Avigdor Stematsky | |
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Avigdor Stematsky (1958) |
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Born | 1908 Odessa |
Nationality | Israeli, Jewish |
Field | Painting |
Training | Bezalel Academy of Art and Design |
Movement | Israeli art |
Avigdor Stematsky (1908–89) was a Russian-born Israeli painter. He is considered one of the pioneers of Israeli abstract art.[1]
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Stematsky was born in 1908 in Odessa. In 1922, he immigrated to Palestine and attended the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem from 1926 to 1928. He joined the Massad group in Tel Aviv. In 1929, he went to Paris to study at Académie de la Grande Chaumière and Académie Colarossi. He was one of the founders of the New Horizons group, which sought a new visual vocabulary that would free Israeli art from its obsession with local content and form.[2] He held his first solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art at the age of 31.[3]. In the constellation of Israel art, Stematsky and Yehezkiel Streichman stand out as a pair. Although each developed his own distinct, individual style, there are many points of affinity between them: a common background as students of Bezalel in the 1920s, a response to the influences of the Jewish School of Paris in the 1930s, and of the "modern" (late cubist) art in the 1940s and fifties, when they were also leading teachers in Tel Aviv.
Stematsky fused the landscape and realism of his early work to create a new abstract style. From 1955, his compositions were based on geometric shapes surrounded by patches of color. In the 1960s, he became interested in rhythm, using patches of color to express feeling and to add a tangible dimension to abstract shapes.[4] In the last decade of his life, he created a series of pure abstracts using a unique technique of thinned tempera on industrial paper.[5]
In 2005, he was voted the 186th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.[6]