Midnight

Winner of the 2021 Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist
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: Shai Azoulay, Miriam Cabessa, Eli Petel