Avner Ben-Gal was born in Israel in 1966 and studied at Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Ben-Gal’s narrative paintings are intense, executed with a sweeping brush in dull dark grays. The images are created in part in the viewer’s imagination, which completes the implied into stories, visions and nightmares. His paintings are disturbing, rich in content on a variety of interesting subjects, such as the logic of dreams. Ben-Gal himself calls his work "the architecture of dreams" or "the narrative of dreams." The paintings are like dreams, not only because of their sense of logic or illogic, but also because any attempt to recover or decipher them causes them to disappear, like the effort to catch a dream often causes it to fade. Another interesting aspect that arises in several contexts is the zombie or the living dead. 

Objects also hold the same ambiguity. Inanimate objects such as a match head, battery, vegetables, bones and skeletons, come to life, and living things change into dead. There is a blurring of the distinction between dead, living and inanimate, between hot and cold, and he presents a fluid transition between states of matter: water, earth, air and fire.

In recent years, a refinement or moderation has been noted in his work. Paintings are denser and vested with effort. Recurring themes, old and new, are repeated in a more solid form and amorphous forms that feature in many of his paintings, render them complex and enigmatic.