Winner of the 2025 Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist

Winner of the 2025 Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist

Omer Shach

Awarded in collaboration with the Jerusalem Artists’ House

Omer Shach is the winner of the 2025 Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist, awarded in collaboration with the Jerusalem Artists’ House. Introduced in 2007, the Prize includes a 10,000 NIS award and a solo exhibition at the Jerusalem Artists’ House. Shach’s exhibition will open at the Jerusalem Artists’ House on August 23, 2025.

In their statement, the prize committee members noted:

In Omer Shach’s paintings there is a constant tension between the image and its modes of representation. In the process of painting on canvas, the image evades a single definition: night may also be a blue curtain, or the interior of a shuttered shop, and the doll—a radiant, frozen figure. As the image takes shape, it emerges as charged and ambiguous. Shach’s work is marked by hybrid imagery, merging analogue with digital, realism with fantasy, body and sexuality with nocturnal, fluorescent hues. This fusion evokes an air of mystery, introducing the painting as an object charged with time, memory, and existential unrest, as if the image itself is in motion, suspended, or caught in an imaginary limbo, like a flickering frozen frame from an old videotape.

Shach displays great sensitivity in the choice of color and the material’s application on canvas. At times, the painting appears crafted by a skilled human hand; at others, it bears the imprint of mechanical intervention. This interplay gives rise to a distinctive painterly language, where classical techniques, emphasizing depth, illusion, and composition, coexist with flat, precise gestures reminiscent of drawing on a tablet screen.

Shach’s paintings inhabit a dual realm, between the physical surface of the canvas and the sensation of a digital screen: illuminated, flat, and pulsating. This space spawns a personal, bold and contemporary language that reveals emotional and visual depth, while echoing questions of time, the body, technology, and consciousness.

For all these qualities, we have chosen to confer the 2025 Osnat Mozes Painting Prize for a Young Artist on Omer Shach.

Prize committee: Hadas Hassid, Tal Yerushalmi, Sagie Azoulay

Events in the exhibition:

* The award ceremony will be held on August 24, 2025 *

Omer Shach – CV

1991 Born in Jerusalem; Lives and works in Tel Aviv

Education

2021            Olympus Art and Practice Post Graduate Seminar, Liebling-Haus

2015 – 2019 BFA in Shenkar College at the Multidisciplinary Department for the Arts

Solo Exhibitions

2021            “Exhibition in the Depth of a Beam”, Liebling-Haus, Tel-Aviv. Curators: Eran Eisenhamer and Anna Wild

2024            “Birthday in the Office”, Herzl 154, Tel-Aviv

2025            “Lovers Moloch”, The Autonomous Biennale, Tel-Aviv. Curator: Roy Brand

Group Exhibitions

2018            “Open for Renovation”, duo with Naama Bar-Or, Liebling-Haus, Tel-Aviv

2019            “Digital Interfaces”, Shenkar Graduation Exhibition, Ramat Gan

2020            “Kissing Interfaces”, duo show with Adam Elezra, A La Rampa, Tel-Aviv

2020            “Cut in Wood”, Kfar Saba Municipal Gallery curator: Meira Perry-Lehmann

2020            “Determination”, Edmond de Rothschild Center, Tel-Aviv. curator: Avi Kritzman

2021            “Smooth Pursuit”, third floor from the left, Tel-Aviv. curator: Meital Aviram

2021            “Flat Space”, Hecht Museum, Haifa. Curator: Ina Berkowitz

2021            “Roof Tiles and Snails”, duo show with Roni Kim, Alfred Gallery, Tel-Aviv

2022            Winner of Rabia Prize, duo show with Liz Schneider, Shenkar Gallery, Ramat Gan. curator: Gilad Efrat

2023            “Dawn Prayer”, HaAliya Gallery, Tel-Aviv. curator: Shachaf Levi

2023            “Ghost Busters”, Art-Space, Tel-Aviv. curator: Daniel Tzdaka Cohen

2024            “Angles of Sabotage”, Parterre Gallery, Tel-Aviv. curator: Alicia Kamien Kazhdan

2025            “Land Sea”, Museum of Bat-Yam, Bat-Yam. curator: Adi Dahan

2025            “School of the City Presents”, Leibling Haus, Tel-Aviv. curators: Eran Eisenhamer and Maayan Moses

Events and Residencies

2024            Preview, a performative ceremonial installation, Liebling Haus, Tel-Aviv. sound: Shaul Dahan, curator: Roni Raviv,

2023            La Folie Barbizon, artist summer residency in Barbizon, France

2021            Fresh Paint Art Fair, participation as an independent artist

2019            Cergy-Shenkar Workshop, Paris, France

Prizes

2022            Rabia Prize for painting, drawing and printmaking

2021            Hecht Prize for young artist

2019            Graduation with distinction from Shenkar College

2018            Low Tech Nation Hackathon, at the Midrasha gallery, Yarakon 19