ASPEN, CO.-The Aspen Art Museum will present Avner Ben-Gal, on view August 2 – October 14, 2007. The majority of texts written about Avner Ben-Gal focus on his nationality. The majority of his paintings from the early 2000s include graphic, violent imagery. Ben-Gal’s recent work, however, has evolved beyond the political and religious challenges of the Middle East to convey the more oblique foreboding of contemporary society, with all of its attendant horrors, both perceived and actual. Employing a muted palette, he paints landscapes of nonspecific places—those from a dream or a novel or an overheard rumor—and his compositions include blurred figures or solitary vegetation. Although his spaces are bleak and charged with emotion, they are neither prescriptive nor didactic. The works are a more universal reflection on our collective current life—a life that, although at times desolate, is punctuated by intense beauty. For his first one-person museum exhibition in the United States, Ben-Gal will create new paintings on paper. On the occasion of the exhibition, the museum will publish a fully-illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and Douglas Fogle, curator of the 2008 Carnegie International.

Avner Ben-Gal is organized by the Aspen Art Museum, funded in part by the AAM National Council, with additional underwriting by Nancy and Bob Magoon.

Avner Ben-Gal received his BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel, in 1993. He has had one-person exhibitions at The Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem; Tel-Aviv Museum of Art; and Museum Fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, Belgium; and The Jewish Museum, New York. In 2003, he was selected to participate in the 50th Venice Biennale.