About: Ori Reisman
Ori Reisman was born in Kibbutz Tel Yosef and grew up in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Later in his life he moved to France for a period of two years and when he returned to Tel Aviv he began studying at the art studio of Yitzhak Frenkel. After graduating he started his training at Kibbutz Yagur where he met Mazal Hamdi and they married. Mazal was a member of a Yemenite Jerusalemite family whom its members and their surroundings Reizman often painted (the synagogue paintings, Jerusalem alleys, etc.) In 1949 he joined the founders of Kibbutz Kabri where he lived and painted until the end of his days. Later he moved to Paris and studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), there he joined other Israeli artists such as Lea Nikel, Eliyahu Gat and Michael Gross, in 1953 he returned to Israel. The unique motif of Reisman is the "woman-landscape" motif that preoccupied Reisman in the 1960s, mainly in the convergence of the two motifs. For Reisman, landscape is like a woman's body and his approach to the landscape is sensual-erotic. More than once, hills or mountains were spread across the canvas as if expecting to be fertilized. But on top of landscapes and mountains positioned in a woman's posture, Reisman merged the fertility of the woman/land with timeless peace. All done by combining the few colors and the concise composition pattern. Another recurring motif is in the portraits, paintings whose temperamental process is apparent: A painting that reveals refined, erased and added brushstrokes, indicating of Reisman's renouncement of any facial or body model forming, and the portrait is the product of disassembling and assembling color patches. Reisman spent most of his life on the fringes of the Israeli art world and only at the end of his life and after his death did he achieve publicity and global recognition. During his career, Reisman exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Israel Museum and the Ein Harod Museum of Art. In 1988, he won the Israel Discount Bank Prize for an Israeli Artist, and in 1989 he won The Nahum Gutman Histadrut Prize for Painting and Sculpture.
