Selected Works

Born in Israel in 1982, Kobi Assaf lives and works in Tel Aviv. His paintings bring the cultural spirit of the 19th century to the 21st.

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They appear to be drenched in a non-Israeli brown mist, illuminated with a dim twilight, to create the look of paintings made before the era of electricity. The imprint of Romanticism is in his paintings, with its yearning for distant realms, like the European Romantics, yet they also contain sober self-aware modernism.

To achieve this goal, Assaf shatters the philosophical harmony of thought, leaving sections of his paintings bare and unfinished. He depends on his sharp painterly skills and scatters hints that suffice to construct a world that is “similar” but restless. Assaf ‘s work fundamentally differs from the conventions of Classicism and Romanticism that strove to achieve a sensation of peacefulness, as he brings to the threshold of consciousness a demonic, seductive and dark universe.