| Moshe Gershuni | |
|---|---|
Photograph of Moshe Gershuni, 2007 |
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| Born | 1936 (age 75–76) Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Nationality | Israeli |
| Field | Painting |
| Training | Avni Institute of Art and Design, Tel Aviv |
| Movement | Israeli art |
Moshe Gershuni (born 1936) is an Israeli painter.
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Moshe Gershuni was born in 1936 in Tel Aviv in the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents Yona and Zvi Kutner immigrated there from Poland in the 1920s. He spent his childhood in Tel Aviv and graduated from the local religious high school in 1954. He has two siblings; a brother named Avshalom and a sister named Mira. From 1960 to 1964 he studied at the Avni Institute of Art and Design, an Israeli art school located in Tel Aviv.[1] Moshe Gershuni was one of the first artists in Israel to explore highly modernistic, iconoclastic possibilities, at the end of the 1960s creating works which were paradigms of Conceptual art, and in the 1970s extending his art to public performance. As a stimulating teacher in Bezalel, he fueled the imagination of many young artists, especially towards political involvement. At the Venice Biennale in 1980, Gershuni showed paintings on paper in red lacquer, amidst canals of blood, creating an atmosphere of Holocaust. Immediately afterwards he began a period of painting which stands out as a milestone in Israeli art. Using free scrawl, drip, finger paint and calligraphy, he suggests personal, Zionist, Moslem and Christian symbols. These works seem to have been created in a trance. His recent silk screens ("Kaddish") are among the finest produced in the country in recent years.
After graduating in 1964 from the Avni Institute of Art and Design he worked as a professor at various art schools. From 1972 to 1977 he worked as a professor at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel's national school of art. From 1978 to 1986 he taught at the Art Teachers Training College, in Ramat HaSharon.[1]