“The depth of the paper and shades of black"
About the artist
b. 1956, Israel.
Studied at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten-The Royal Academy of Arts, Amsterdam, where he acquired a foundation of academic painting and drawing, on which he continues to base the art he creates.
In 2012, Ben-Ami moved his studio to Tel Aviv where he currently works.
His recent works are on paper, using drawing materials, primarily various charcoals and crayons.
Ben-Ami treats these large-scale works as paintings, not drawings.
The inception of the creative process focuses on an examination of “the depth of the paper and shades of black,” ( from Shir Meller-Yamaguchi’s catalog article for Sketches of Time).
There is a paradox between the visibility of the heavy patches of charcoal and the universal themes in the works and between the platform on which Dror works: simple paper, so transitory and fragile.
“Dror Ben-Ami’s artworks contain material and non-material existence simultaneously.
Painting is a space in which signs of life gradually appear and melt away. Ben-Ami chooses to work with very vulnerable paper which he perforates, punctures, covers with layers of charcoal, and erases. Thus he obtains a fine line reminiscent of etching” (from Shir Meller-Yamaguchi’s catalog article for Sketches of Time).
Dror Ben-Ami’s themes are atemporal and borderless – life and death, materiality and decomposition, beauty and the void.
The painterly experience is severed from the experience of the here and now, floating between the conscious level and the unconscious.
