Sagie Azoulay

This year’s winner of the Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist is Sagie Azoulay.

Excerpts from the Prize Committee’s decision: Sagie Azoulay’s exploration of the painting medium is multi-dimensional and rich in artistic insight. His work creates an illusory tension between depth and ethereal momentum; it is formed as a structure that disintegrates in space, paradoxically constructed from physical paint layers hemmed in by stencil.

Into an excavation-like structure, which captures quasi-architectonic images, oscillating between modernist abstraction and deconstruction of the artistic dimension, Azoulay threads expressive and sensitive painting segments – sculptural images taken from an ancient cultural lexicon, emphasizing the painting’s mythical power that stretches between sanctity and sublimity on the one hand, and secularization and erasure on the other hand. The Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist is awarded to Sagie Azoulay for his virtuosic painting and use of a multiplicity of painting languages, which simultaneously constructs and dismantles local as well as universal narratives.