TEL AVIV.- Prof. Mordechai Omer, Director and Chief Curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, is curator of the exhibition of recent paintings by the young Israeli artist Adam Gershuni.

Loyalty to the visual experience and the impulse to prevent it from slipping away are the moving force of Aram Gershuni's artistic work, who declares: "There is only the fight to recover what has been lost." Adhering to the motif that serves as his means – portrait, landscape, still life or any other image he happens upon – he holds on to the primal, fragile and almost-disappearing experience in order to try and restore its existence as a painting. Although Aram Gershuni (b. 1967) regards the painting's impersonal as an indispensable value, he enters, especially in portraits, into powerful, emotionally charged fields that penetrate the most intimate autobiography of the family cell: his father, mother, wife, children. In the portraits, as well as in his dealings with landscapes or still life, the motifs themselves minimize their presence, and in return a rich, experience-laden world unfolds for the spectator, a world detached from the model and focused on the painting's plastic values. Aram Gershuni's pictorial values are well-anchored in the medium's rich and long-standing traditions, with an almost physical link to works of masters such as Antonello da Massina and Ingres, or more contemporary artists such as the American Lennart Anderson or the English Euan Uglow.

Aram Gershuni's parents, Moshe Gershuni and Bianca Eshel Gershuni are leading Israeli artists. The early work of his father was rooted within social-political awareness. During Aram's adolescent years, Moshe Gershuni's work moved away from conceptualism and became expressive and sensual, accompanied by doubts about the power of artistic work. In 1980, in a text about his work presented at the Venice Biennale, he declared: "Art is not life itself, and likewise art does not alleviate life's sorrows. Art has the call of the individual who has despaired of the possibility that his art may change the moves of life, that is, the moves of society. Art is the result of improbability, in fact of overwhelming despair that can only be uttered".