TEL AVIV.- Photographer Eli Singalovski is this year's winner of the Lauren and Mitchell Presser Photography Award for a Young Israeli Artist. This is the fifth time the prize has been awarded; previous winners are Rami Maymon (2015), Mark Yashaev (2016), Ronit Porat (2017) and Daniel Tsal (2018). The prize carries a $5,000 grant and a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Eli Singalovski (born in 1984), a graduate of the Photography Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, has exhibited alone and in group exhibitions in galleries in Israel and abroad. His works have been featured in local and international publications and magazines.

In 2017 he was awarded a Fellowship and Residency Program at Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany. In 2014 he was awarded the Elie Moshe EPSON Award for Excellence in the Art of Photography in Israel and the Revital Seri Scholarship for Academic Excellence, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Singalovski’s exhibition will be presented at Tel Aviv Museum of Art towards the end of 2020.

The jury panel included Doron Rabina, Chief Curator at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Joerg Bader, Director of the Swiss Photographic Center of Geneva and Maya Benton, independent curator, has curated in the past decade at the International Center of Photography (ICP), USA.

The judges noted that “Eli Singalovski creates a typological photographic research that charts the heritage of modern Brutalist architecture, of post-war architecture in Eastern Bloc countries, in Germany and in Israel. Through photography he examines complex urban processes that took place in Israel and in Europe following WWII, among them the ever-growing polarization between East and West and the urgent need for rebuilding constructions for institutions and for living accommodation. Singalovski photographs buildings at night, using long exposure, in dramatic black-and-white and centered compositions that capture the whole structure. He isolates the photographed buildings from their environment and neutralizes ‘distractions’ and interferences, in order to focus the viewer’s gaze on the façade of the architectural object, with its plethora of details against black, opaque skies. The choice to use this method of photography emphasizes the buildings’ monumentality and plasticity and features them as sculptural presences in the expanse, without human figures, whose absence is one component in a rich utterance of alienation in the modern contemporary era.”