Gilad Efrat

We are pleased to present Gilad Efrat's upcoming solo show, October Cycle. The exhibition features one of Efrat's most potent bodies of work, created in response to the horrifying events of October 7 and their aftermath.

“A few days after Saturday, October 7, I went to the studio to try to figure out how to continue working on my paintings when reality—the same reality that I sometimes work hard to keep outside of the studio—penetrated the walls, smashed the windows, and settled in its very heart.“

—Gilad Efrat

Gilad Efrat (b. 1969, Be’er Sheva, Israel; lives and works in Tel Aviv) is one of the leading Israeli artists of his generation. His works were exhibited in numerous group and solo shows worldwide, including a 2019 solo show at the Israel Museum.

Over the years, his work has presented an ongoing interplay between figurative, photography-based painting and abstraction.

His unique painting style is characterized by a method of “digging” into layers of thick paint, often necessitating that they be completed in a very short period of time - before the paint changes consistency. His earliest works, which focused on local and politically significant archaeological sites, and, later, monochromatic depictions of barren deserts, swamps, and moonscapes - all created with a special technique by subtracting layers of paint to expose the image.

A significant aspect of Efrat’s oeuvre is a series of large-scale portraits of apes from the Houston Zoo, depicting primates that themselves engaged in creating abstract works - paintings that were sold by the Zoo. These portraits marked a crucial moment in Efrat’s transition to abstraction, addressing the tension between the figurative and the abstract in new terms.

Since 2014, Efrat has been creating bold-colored abstract paintings, drawing attention to the work process itself—smearing, scratching, and constructing the surface with palette knives and a squeegee. The stratified labor in his recent works, “like geological strata that have accumulated over millennia,” calls to mind a landscape that has been abstracted, ruined, and peeled.

“The archaeological excavation is the digging into the canvas, history is the construction of paint layers, and the destruction is the removal of layers, the wiping, and erasure. [...] I am always in reality as well as in history”.

Born 1969, Beer Sheva, Israel; lives and works in Tel-Aviv. Efrat received a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, in 1995 and an MFA from The Hebrew University and Bezalel in 2003. In 2004, he became the Core Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Currently, he serves as an Associate Professor and the head of the painting department at the Multidisciplinary Art School, Shenkar – Engineering, Design, Art – Ramat-Gan, Israel. He is the recipient of, among others, the Michel Kikoïne Prize for Israeli Painting, Tel-Aviv University (2015) The Israeli Minister of Culture Prize (2012), and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2007). Since 1997, Efrat participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Israel, the US, and Europe. In 2019 Efrat was the subject of a large-scale solo exhibition at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, titled Gilad Efrat: Inside Painting.