Lot 61: q - IDO BAR-EL B. 1959

59 7/8 by 20 7/8 in.<br><br>152 by 53cm

oil on wooden door

painted in 1987

PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE ISRAEL PHOENIX ASSURANCE COMPANY

Ido Bar-El was born in Tel Aviv in 1959 and studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem between 1980-1984. He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Israel and abroad including the São Paolo Biennial in 1994, the Ludwig Museum, Cologne in 1998 and the Jewish Museum, New York in 1998-99.

Arturo Schwartz discusses the artist's work and comments: "Ido Bar-El's works may be disconcerting at first glance because of their sheer terseness, bordering on minimalism, their almost monochromatic range, and the seemingly reserved emotional impact of their images. In sharp contrast to this initial impression, his paintings, when reinvestigated, captivate the viewer by dint of their conceptual density, visual coherence, and poetic logic. Here I shall attempt to account for this seeming contradiction.
Bar-El is, in effect, reactivating, by means of a revolutionary visual code, the Duchampian idea of the Readymade and the Surrealist notion of the found object. He paints almost exclusively on wood or plywood, used either in its original state or in the form of an object discarded by its previous owner, boxes, drawers, doors, cupboards, bedsteads, TV stands, medicine chests, parts of acoustic ceilings, etc. As long as it is made of wood, any surface is suitable for his paintings. The domestic object, often treated from an unexpected angle, becomes a screen on which Bar-El projects his idiosyncratic dream-universe and vision of the world." (Arturo Schwartz in Love at First Sight: The Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwartz Collection of Israeli Art, Jerusalem, The Israel Museum (exhibition catalogue), 2001, p. 148)