ARTcnet.com Fine Art Gallery Presents Israeli artist Moshe Kupferman Abstract Oil Paintings: Untitled, 1972, and Untitled, 1980

	Moshe Kupferman
	Abstract Painting
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Moshe Kupferman died on Friday June 20, 2003, of a heart attack. The Inquirer obituary for Kupferman is posted here.
Born in 1926, Jaroslav, Galicia, Poland Exiled with family in 1941-45; spent part of World War II in detention camp in the Ural Mountains (Ural and Kazakhstan) Holocaust survivor Emigrated to Israel in 1948 Participated in the founding of Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot (Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz) in 1949 Awards 1971 Schiff Prize of Haifa Municipality 1972 Sandberg Prize for an Israeli artist, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem 2001 Israel Prize
Among Kupferman’s One-Person Exhibitions since 1980 are the Wadsworth Athenuem; the International Art Fair in Basel; the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam); the Israel Museum (Jerusalem); the Tel Aviv Museum; the Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris; the Kibbutz Eilon (Upper Galilee); the Musee d'Art Contemporain, Dunkirk. Kupferman is being honored by a retrospective of his work at the Israel Museum - Jan-April, 2002 Among Kupferman’s Selected Group Exhibitions since 1980 are The Jewish Museum (NY); the Israel Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.); the Bat Yam Museum; the Tel Aviv Museum; the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Antwerp); the 42^nd International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Israel Pavilion; Exit Art (NY); Taidehalli, Helsinki and Konsthall, Lund, Sweden.
The Untitled painting below is a rare green, whereas Kupferman often relied upon grayish-mauve, black and white. Kupferman’s paintings are characterized by one dominant hue and a repetition of lines in parallel, Xform or grid. His works are both ordered and disordered, from the conscious and the subconscious, as shown by his subtle manipulation of color.
In 1995, before the Carnegie International (Pittsburgh, PA), curator Richard Armstrong said of Kupferman’s gestural abstraction, "...Kupferman will contribute ...a more severe type of abstraction. There’s a wonderful infusion of the countryside that he lives in, but it’s channeled into abstract forms because of the cultural taboos against representation in traditional Jewish culture. Indeed, contemporary abstraction is full of tacit references to reality..." article by Pepe Karmel, frequent writer for the New York Times and other publications.
Please click on painting for enlargement

Moshe Kupferman Abstract Oil Painting: Untitled, 1972
37 3/4"H x 37 3/4"W; 96cm x 96cm; oil painting on canvas; framed; Shipping, handling and insurance included; pristine condition; signed on the verso Kupferman; dated 1972; also signed in Hebrew on the verso. Painting was acquired at the Bertha Urdang Gallery in New York City in 1978.

*SOLD

The book, "One Hundred Years of Art in Israel," by Gideon Ofrat, translated by Peretz Kidron, and produced in cooperation with the Mitzel Museum of Judaica, says of Kupferman, "The work of Moshe Kupferman...may be considered a bridge between the Israeli abstract of New Horizons and the later epistemological minimalism. Bertha Urdang, in an article for the catalog of a 1980 Israel Museum exhibit in her honor, identified Kupferman’s work as the complementary pole of Jewish art. She was fascinated by his spiritual landscapes, created through the addition and removal of layers and lines of paint and the dialogue between the overt and the concealed. In 1976, Robert Pincus-Witten defined his work as abstract Jewish art at its finest."

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