Eti Jacobi Lelior

Established artist

Eti Jacobi Lelior was born in Jaffa in 1961. She studied art at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, as well as classics and philosophy at Tel Aviv University. 


She has been exhibiting her work since 1981 and is currently teaching at Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts – Beit Berl College and at Bezalel Academy for Art and Design, Jerusalem.


Over the last forty years, the works of Jacobi, a prominent figure in the Israeli art landscape, have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and has been included in many group exhibitions.


A true “painter painter,” in her body of work Jacobi has been tirelessly pursuing an impossible mission: that of decoding the oldest visual language in human history by questioning many of the medium’s constitutive distinctions – abstraction versus figuration, monumentality versus intimacy, technical proficiency versus artistic freedom, creation versus appropriation, and tradition versus innovation.

In the last ten years, this quest has brought Jacobi to an extreme position, embodied in a unique series of works in which a multitude of paint layers is applied on large square canvases. Starting from the simple, yet pivotal fact, that these works cannot be photographed – they can only be experienced physically – Jacobi’s work puts at stake our very understanding of art.

 

In parallel to this virtuous path, Jacobi started to bring to the fore – mainly through the language of drawing – a figurative vocabulary that is as far from her main practice as it is perfectly complementary to it. 

 

Witty and nonchalant, these works are the conceptual translations of the so-called “preparatory drawings” we all know from the history of art, although here they first of all ‘prepare’ the artist to perform her acrobatic brushstrokes as well as to warm up the eye of the viewer for her challenging and yet beautiful polychromatic compositions.

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