Michael Halak
Michael Halak paints in a remarkably skilled realistic style. His works belong to the western tradition of realist, illusory paintings. Halak always paints from observation – directly or by means of photographs – turning his gaze towards his immediate reality, and capturing various interiors or exteriors. The illusion of reality represented on his canvases is seductively beautiful, yet at the same time it is revealed to carry a disturbing charge that involves disruption and disintegration. Signs that allude to states of distress, destruction, and crisis are reoccurring motifs in his compositions.
The underlying question that shapes Michael Halak’s work (as well as his life, being born into a Palestinian Christian family), concerns the connection between man and place and related to themes of presence and absence, identification and dis-identification, witnessing and silencing, memory and imposed oblivion. Another important axis in his work is the tension between belonging and estrangement.
He has shown at the Florence Academy of Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Haifa Museum of Art. He received the Rappaport Prize for Young Artist, the Young Artist Prize from the Ministry of Culture and Sport, and a Scholarship from the America – Israel Cultural Foundation.
Courtesy of …
Michael Halak paints in a remarkably skilled realistic style. His works belong to the western tradition of realist, illusory paintings. Halak always paints from observation – directly or by means of photographs – turning his gaze towards his immediate reality, and capturing various interiors or exteriors. The illusion of reality represented on his canvases is seductively beautiful, yet at the same time it is revealed to carry a disturbing charge that involves disruption and disintegration. Signs that allude to states of distress, destruction, and crisis are reoccurring motifs in his compositions.
The underlying question that shapes Michael Halak’s work (as well as his life, being born into a Palestinian Christian family), concerns the connection between man and place and related to themes of presence and absence, identification and dis-identification, witnessing and silencing, memory and imposed oblivion. Another important axis in his work is the tension between belonging and estrangement.
He has shown at the Florence Academy of Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and Haifa Museum of Art. He received the Rappaport Prize for Young Artist, the Young Artist Prize from the Ministry of Culture and Sport, and a Scholarship from the America – Israel Cultural Foundation.
Courtesy of Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art