Oren Eliav was born in 1975, and is a graduate of Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and the MA program of the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Tel Aviv. Oren Eliav's work is multifaceted and multi-layered, but basically is deeply committed to the medium of painting, its historical baggage and possibilities in the context of contemporary art and theory.

Oren Eliav's paintings deal with the mental and physiological relationship between viewer and painting.

The paintings are present a deceptive territory where cultural knowledge and the physical act of seeing competing on the role in the consciousness of the viewer, and as such they can see both the illusion and disillusionment of it. As he examines religious imagery and optical effects as expressed in the medium of painting, he repeatedly exposes the complex and tense relations between "Seeing" and "Believing".