Alien, 2008, etching, 37.5 x 37.5 cm, courtesy of the artist
Gil Yefman
Gil Yefman's etching series encompasses religious icons and familiar local monuments, alongside human and animal figures, combined with apocalyptical images such as an atomic mushroom cloud and a black sun. Using surreal syntax reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico, disrupting received meanings and playing poetic games, Yefman has created a kind of black and white tragic circus - a carnivalesque, mutated show performing in a threatening, ecologically crumbling world of gender and sexual oppression, violence and warped power relations. At the center of each of the scenes stands a morose, seemingly excommunicated, androgynous, freakish and grotesque human figure. It is the subject of ridicule, simultaneously seeming to enchant the world and usher in a new logic. The medium's traditional connotations and Yefman's Classical style of drawing heighten the works' subversive character.
Born in Kibbutz Ramat Yohanan, 1979; lives and works in Tel Aviv
