TEL AVIV.- Tel Aviv Museum of Art announced that Photographer Vera Vladimirsky is the 2021 winner of the Lauren and Mitchell Presser Photography Award for a Young Israeli Artist.

Vera Vladimirsky (b. 1984 Ukraine, FSS, immigrated to Israel in 1991, lives and works in Tel Aviv) is a graduate of the Department of Photography, Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, Jerusalem, and holds an M.F.A. from the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, Tel Aviv. She has exhibited alone and in group exhibitions in Israel and abroad, and was awarded the Young Artist’s Prize, Israel's Ministry of Culture (2016) and the Yuri Stern Prize, Israel's Ministry of Aliyah and Integration (2018).

The Jury noted that “Vera Vladimirsky’s work deals with her impressions as an immigrant and her experiences as a young person searching for her identity and her path in the world. Thus,for example, in the project “The Last Apartment,” Vladimirsky returned to all the 26 apartments in which she had lived and photographed them. She then placed the photographs in her current apartment and re-photographed them to create a collage. In another work, she printed a wallpaper reminiscent of the domestic surroundings familiar from her childhood in the Ukraine, with a continuous pattern of Israeli flora, cyclamens and thistles. Vladimirsky’s work is sensitive and humorous and is characterized by a sharp awareness of the built, heroic environment of the modernist Israeli projects, as well as of its faults, manifested through late neglect. She uses her extensive knowledge of early 20th-century avant-garde photography for her contemporary aesthetic choices. Vladimirsky’s experiments in collage, montage and photographic installations in space all offer a viewing experience that merges an inter-cultural encounter between the past and the present, the here and the now.

The Jury Committee included Mira Lapidot, Chief Curator at Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Dr. Simone Forster from the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich and Dr. Thomas Seelig, Head of Photography, Museum Folkwang, Essen.

This is the seventh time the annual prize has been awarded; previous winners are Rami Maymon (2015), Mark Yashaev (2016), Ronit Porat (2017), Daniel Tsal (2018), Eli Singalovski (2019) and Efrat Hakimi (2020). The prize carries a $5,000 grant and a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.