The Ateliers - Solo Exhibition of Ofer Lellouche will been unveiled at Shanghai Himalayas Museum on March 30, 2014. Jointly organized by the Consulate General of Israel in Shanghai and Shanghai Himalayas Museum, the exhibition features 92 works of Ofer, including 6 pieces of sculpture, 34 pieces of painting (wood cuts, etchings, lithographs and ink wash), 50 photographs and 2 video performances.

A painter, sculptor, etcher and educator, Ofer Lellouche was born in Tunisia, 1947. He studied Mathematics and Physics at Saint Louis college, Paris. In 1966, two months before his final examinations he ran away from home to Israel, and in 1968, severe hepatitis immobilized him for several months, during when he started to paint. Began his artistic career in the 1970s by concentrating on video art, Ofer soon felt a need to “get back to basics”- painting. For many years, the painted self-portrait was his consuming passion. Ofer later branched out to landscapes, the still life, and the nude model. Most recently, this versatile artist has focused on sculpture. His sculptures are mainly portraits, modeling the spirits to express people’s instantaneous state.

“The temptation to create a work that would be a synthesis of all the fragments in my works arises within me”; yet at the same time, Ofer recognized that this “work”, can not be a single specific one, or it would just be another work to be added to the collection. Here comes the concept of Atelier: “put some of my works together, or rather, to put them as close to each other as possible”, “seeking for some veiled presence hiding under this haphazard multiplicity,”, and “to experience the confrontation of their solitudes”.

The exhibition Ateliers will mainly feature Ofer’s etchings and sculptures: A self portrait on a transparent mirror in the 1970s, landscapes in the early 1980s, figures in landscapes in the late 1980s, The Ateliers in the 1990s, and symbolistic sculptures in the new century.

*image (left)
© Ofer Lellouche