Amikam Toren

For more than four decades, Amikam Toren’s work has explored the divisions between high and low art and what the bare essential means of painting are. Toren’s reductivist approach examines how minimal intervention by the artist can produce a work of profound intellectual rigor and salience. Previous work has included incising text into paintings purchased from thrift stores or flea markets and paintings made only of canvas and polyvinyl sizing. In his Armchair Paintings series, such as Armchair Painting – Untitled (inner beauty), from 2008, Toren uses paintings bought at flea markets and excises phrases from the canvas. Here, a street scene set in a provincial European village has been indited with the words “inner beauty,” celebrating the amateur painting in spite of its lack of technical or academic sophistication.

Toren’s work has been included in shows at the Neuberger Museum of Art in New York and the Ramat-Gan Museum for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. He has participated in the Venice and Paris Biennales, among many others, and his worked has been exhibited internationally in Israel, Europe, and the United States since the early 1980s.