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Tomer Rosenthal

Tomer Rosenthal, born 1987 in Jerusalem, is an artist living and working in Berlin. His solo exhibiton Midnight was presented at The Jerusalem Artists’ House in 2021. Rosenthal’s work has been shown in group exhibitions in Israel and Europe. In 2021 he published Ingress presenting 55 works on paper. For his work he is the recipient of the Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist (2021), the New York Foundation for The Art’s Artist Fund (2018) and Bezalel’s Keshet Award (2011). He has been a guest lecturer at HaMidrasha – Faculty of the Arts, Beit Berl and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. He received his BFA and MFA degrees in Fine Art from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem (2011 and 2014). Rosenthal has DJed in music festivals and art events in Israel and Europe and designed soundtracks for dance performances.

Tomer Rosenthal’s drawings are rooted in an idiosyncratic cosmology of images — both personal and universal. His works explore symbols and images from ancient religions and cultures, ranging from Neo-Assyrian stone reliefs to medieval illuminated chronicles, 19th century symbolism, and Northern Renaissance iconography. Drawing from a wide range of sources, the world created in his drawings refuses a linear understanding of history — ancient symbols coexist and meld with contemporary imagery, transgressing cultural and temporal boundaries, generating a new, expansive psychic world. The drawings record explorations into non-linear thought and the unconscious, presenting hybrid figures that blur the borders between human, animal and plant highlighting an interaction between light and shadow. 

Tomer Rosenthal presents a cohesive, idiosyncratic body of work. His art exclusively addresses the act of drawing, extracting therefrom an inner gaze at once deep and dim. Rosenthal explores the inner self, the psyche, and a situation which seems ostensibly impossible to describe via images. His work transpires in a slow-paced space. It spawns figures introduced as animist (a term coined by anthropologist E.B. Tylor as one of the earliest sources for religion, and hence for the spirit and the soul), oscillating between the symbolic and the organic in a space of total silence, as if they were on the brink of stagnation; at times seductive, they reveal to the viewer something about him/herself, perhaps about inner foreignness or about an aspect both threatening and comforting in one’s inner world. Rosenthal’s works call for concentration, deepening, personal viewing, which requires breathing space.

— Jury of the 2021 Osnat Mozes Prize for a Young Artist
© Tomer Rosenthal