Ori Gersht
Born 1967, Tel-Aviv, Israel
Ori Gersht studied photography, film and video in London at the University of Westminster (1989-1992) and the Royal College of Art (1993-1995).
He was appointed Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Kent in 2006.
Gerscht is a photographer and film maker who has created an impressive body of work encompassing themes such as life and death, beauty and destruction which he explores through hauntingly beautiful images, challenging the way we perceive reality and history. Notable early works refer back to his own memories of war, as a child during the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Lebanon War in 1982 and the first Palestinian Intifada when he was completing his military service. In the late 1990s he made several journeys to former war sites, including Sarajevo, Krakow, Ukraine, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, capturing elegiac images of landscapes which reveal minimal traces of conflict but which powerfully evoke a sense of loss and tragedy.
The genre of still life is another area to which Gerscht has brought a singular, personal perspective. In these works he assembles sumptuous arrangements of flowers or vegetables and fruit in the style of the great still life artists of the past like Juan Cotán and Jan van Huysum. Whilst filming these with high definition, slow-motion digital equipment, they are exploded or shot with a high velocity bullet transforming a beautiful, peaceful image into one of violence which gradually subsides into eerie stillness.
In a relatively brief, fifteen year, career thus far, Gerscht has received considerable and far-reaching acclaim; he has been in group and solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States at major venues in London, Naples, Oslo, Tromsø, Toulon, Barcelona, Prague, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Boston. His work is held in more than twenty national and international public collections.
Time After Time, Blow Up no.11 | |
Time after Time, Blow Up no.12 |