Tal Broitman

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

Excerpts of the prize committee’s decision At the center of a ‘crazy,’ grotesque series of paintings stands a low-browed, comic protagonist, named ‘Israel.’ The hero’s face has been reduced to a pair of eyes and a jaw full of white teeth. With one hand, he fills his car with gasoline, while holding a lit match in the other. This is a young man who devours life – and the world, as well – in one gulp.

Broitman’s paintings are fresh, rendered with virtuoso flair. He has no barriers and no inhibitions: he doesn’t bother with elegance. His paintings are mature and charismatic, a wild, unapologetic celebration of the medium.
The artist takes the cultured medium of oil painting, so laden with historical precedents, and succeeds in infusing it with new, brazen life.

Broitman’s paintings adhere to overflowing exaggeration in which the carnivalesque poetics are formulated holistically and precisely. The artist’s picaresque ’hero,’ an all-powerful, Superman-like acrobat, seems to have emerged from some animated cartoon series to describe an internal and external world on the verge of collapse, heading for a crash. Tal Broitman’s paintings faithfully capture the reflection of a generation as well as the explosive (and “crazy”) Israeli reality.

It is for these reasons that we have decided to award the Osnat Mozes Young Artist Painting Prize to Tal Broitman.

Prize Committee: Maya Attoun, Pesach Slabosky, Yizhak Livneh