Liat Yossifor

Liat Yossifor's paintings negotiate the relationship between figuration and abstraction. Using a limited tonal range of monochromatic grays, blacks, and whites, she breaks down forms and uses gestural brushstrokes to render portraits and subtle contours of the human body. Yossifor's work addresses themes of the body and its place in history, drawing inspiration from Romantic painters like El Greco, Eugene Delacroix, and Francisco Goya, whose dramatic paintings addressed social and political concerns, as well as the tradition of modernist abstraction. She works in a wet-on-wet technique and suspends her subject in a moment between presence and disappearance, as she carves figures from thick layers of oil paint. Engaging the viewer, Yossifor's paintings demand rigorous observation to perceive the traces of faint figures and faces she enlaces within the paint.