Moshe Gershuni is an Israeli painter and printmaker. From early beginnings as a conceptual artist Gershuni, for the last twenty years, has been painting in an expressive manner. His work is autobiographical as well as touching on matters of national and universal value.
Background
Ethnicity:
His parents Yona and Zvi Kutner immigrated from Poland in the 1920s.
Moshe Gershuni was born in Tel Aviv in 1939 during the British Mandate for Palestine into a family of first generation Polish immigrants. He spent his childhood in Tel Aviv and graduated from the local religious high school in 1954. He has two siblings; a brother named Avshalom and a sister named Mira. Now he lives and works in Tel- Aviv.
Career
Since the 1960s, Moshe Gershuni has adopted an iconoclastic approach, examining paradigms of conceptual art. In the 1970s, he began to experiment with performance art. At the Venice Biennale in 1980, Gershuni showed paintings on paper in red lacquer, amidst canals of blood, creating an atmosphere of Holocaust. Using free scrawl, drip, finger paint and calligraphy, he conjures up personal, Zionist, Moslem and Christian symbols. These works seem to have been created in a trance.
After graduating in 1964 from the Avni Institute of Art and Design he worked as a professor at various art schools. From 1972 to 1977 he worked as a professor at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel's national school of art. From 1978 to 1986 he taught at the Art Teachers Training College, in Ramat HaSharon.