Larry Abramson

Larry Abramson
Larry Abramson, 2005
Born	1954 South Africa
Nationality	Israeli, Jewish
Education	Chelsea College of Art and Design
Known for	Painting
Notable work	Hevel (1989–1990)
Movement	Israeli art

Larry Abramson (1954) is a South African-born Israeli artist.

Larry Abramson was born in 1954 in South Africa. In 1961, his family immigrated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem. In 1970, as a high school senior, he was one of the signators of a conscientious objectors to Israeli rejection of Egyptian President Nasser’s peace initiative. In 1973 Abramson studied a Foundation Course at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. Upon his return to Israel he took a position as printer and curator of exhibitions at the Jerusalem Print Workshop, where he worked for nine years, until 1986.

Abramson's first solo exhibition was in 1975. His work during the 1980s dealt with a variety of iconic symbols from modernist European art, particularly the "Black Square" by Kazimir Malevich, which he used to create dynamic situations combining abstraction and a figurative art idiom.

During 1993 and 1994 Abramson created the series of work "tsooba," which was exhibited at the Kibbutz Art Gallery, Tel Aviv. The series was composed of 38 landscape paintings (oil on canvas), 38 impressions on newspaper of the landscape paintings, and a group of still life paintings after samples of flora taken from the site.

This series relates to a mound of ruins near Kibbutz Tzova, a site which was painted a decade earlier by the artist Joseph Zaritsky. While Zaritsky ignored the Palestinian ruins found on the site and thus abstracted the landscape, Abramson painted the view realistically and then defaced it. By “seeing” the ruins of the Palestinian village, he criticizes the Israeli point of view which seeks to erase the Palestinian identity from the appropriated territory.

In 1984, Abramson joined the teaching staff of the art department of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. In 1992 he was appointed head of the Fine Art department, and in 1996 he founded and headed the Bezalel Program for Young Artists (Master of Fine Art).