Hillel Roman (b.1975) - Palm Trees, Oil on Canvas, 2007.

Signed and dated on the reverse. ...

Hillel Roman (b.1975) - Palm Trees, Oil on Canvas, 2007.

Signed and dated on the reverse.

60x80cm.

Hillel Roman is a visual artist living and working in Tel Aviv, Israel. Roman was born on April 16, 1975, in Los Angeles, California. At age 24 he joined Hamidrasha Art School, Beit Berl College, Israel. In 2004 Roman graduated from Tel-Aviv University, the Department for Poetics and Comparative Literature (magna cum laude), and in 2007 he received his Masters of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Roman employs a wide range of techniques, from drawing, painting and conceptual art, through sculpting and etching, to building fully functional astronomical observatories. After his graduation from Beit Berl college, he assumed a teaching position there, and in the years 2004-2006 he lectured at Avni Institute of Art and Design in Tel Aviv. After having returned from his studies in London, he resumed his position at Beit Berl, and also accepted a teaching role at Thelma Yellin school of Fine Arts. In 2007, Roman received a residency grant at Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris, France. In 2009, he won the Young Artist Prize from the Ministry of culture, Israel. The judging committee said about him: Romans paintings, drawings and etchings, always beautiful and saturated... more than intending to delegate a (renewed) birth of beauty out of the banal, replicated and ordinary, they wish to confront the postmodern spectator with the question what is modern painting...

In an interview with curator Orit Bulgaro in the catalog of Idiolect, an exhibition at the Bat Yam Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009, Roman discussed... the significance of the concrete versus the metaphorical, the human desire to get through the metaphor and to touch, the vain struggle to bridge the distance between the eye and the hand. Maybe that is the privilege of the painter/sculptor, and the source of his relevance, despite it all. In any case, I try to create objects or paintings that exist in that chasm between the concrete and the metaphorical, perhaps that is my way of trying to avoid filling any role.