Jossef Krispel was born in 1974 and graduated from Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the continuing education program at the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Tel Aviv. His work is characterized by existing images: photographs, illustrated children's books, illustrations from encyclopedias and reproductions of works of art, including paintings of the Bible, Andy Warhol’s “Elvis” and classical sculpture such as the statue of Laocoön and His Sons. His paintings are suspended between the longing for a perfect, structured and consistent world, which brings to mind the 18th century, and a dismantled, destroyed and detached world, built on the shaky foundations of post-modernism. 

A desire for perfection on the one hand and awareness of existential defeat on the other embroider a puzzle that testifies to an insatiable hunger for an image that no longer exists, and also to fragments of images which have lost any semblance of belonging to the whole from which they were torn and to which they will never be able to return. The common denominator in all the detached images is painting itself, the very act of painting. This act of painting resembles attempts to retrieve images that are on the verge of vanishing, suffering the anxiety of extinction, and their resuscitation is a symbol for human desire with its every lust and nightmare, from which humanity has been trying to wake from the beginning of days. As Krispel phrases it, he seeks "To paint everything again, anew, without hierarchy, as an index of information made concise."