LONDON.- Following a successful exhibition of the unique drawings of the artist Ofer Josef at the Maison Caillebotte in Paris in 2024, Stephen Ongpin Fine Art and Richard Nagy Ltd. will show a selection of the artist’s latest works on paper. The exhibition, to be held concurrently at each of their galleries in Mayfair, will represent Josef’s inaugural exhibition in London.

Ofer Josef, born in 1965 in Tel Aviv, moved to France at the age of sixteen. He became one of the youngest students to gain admittance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which he entered at seventeen. He spent much of his free time at the Paris zoo, studying animals – in particular felines – and producing numerous animal scenes. After leaving art school, Josef lived in Brazil for some twelve years, including three years working in relative isolation in a small village of some eighty inhabitants on the banks of the Rio Negro, a major tributary of the Amazon River, where he continued to find inspiration in the local wildlife. The artist now divides his time between Spain, Portugal and Brazil, and continues to create his sometimes disturbing, but always memorable visions, bringing them to life with pen and ink washes on paper. Since 1987, Ofer Josef has had successful solo exhibitions of his work in galleries in Berlin, Malmo, Marseille, Paris and Porto.

Josef’s imagination overflows with hundreds of creatures he presents in his ink drawings, revealing an inner world in which human comedy, encompassing the erotic and the grotesque, is always close to tragedy. As has been recently noted of the artist, ‘Ofer Josef has developed a unique style, mixing poetry and darkness. His drawings, of great intensity, evoke fantastic landscapes populated by strange creatures and tortured human figures. The artist explores the themes of solitude, anguish and death, but also hope and resilience.’ The dreamlike imagery of Ofer Josef’s pen and wash works find analogies in the dark prints and drawings of such earlier artists as Francisco de Goya, James Ensor, Victor Hugo, Alfred Kubin, Odilon Redon and Félicien Rops, while he shares with Otto Dix and George Grosz a sense of the grittiness of the dispossessed. Works by some of these artists will be shown at both London galleries to complement to Josef’s drawings.