Ori Aviram
Ori Aviram is a self-taught painter whose work moves between mythology, biblical narrative, portraiture, and abstraction. His practice is marked by sustained experimentation, long-form projects, and an interest in how color and form can produce meaning without resolving into a single style. He has described his work as “expressive colorism” situated between myth and modernity.
Aviram grew up in a home shaped by literature, classical music, and visual art. A close friend of his father, the painter Ivan Schwebel, was a regular presence through the works that hung throughout the family home. Schwebel’s bohemian character stood in contrast to Aviram’s bourgeois parents, but the difference was formative rather than limiting. Art, books, music, and concerts were part of childhood life.
Two experiences directed Aviram toward an artistic career. At seventeen, while living in London to study English, he visited the National Gallery daily, often sitting for extended periods with the paintings. Later, during military service, he began sculpting in clay and casting portraits of fellow soldiers. The satisfaction he found in that work convinced him to pursue visual art more seriously.
Aviram’s degree is in philosophy, not art. He learned to paint independently, beginning with basic materials and sustained work in the studio. Art history, painting techniques, and the development of his own practice came through extensive reading and experimentation. He recognizes that working outside art school has meant lacking an established peer group and institutional connections, but he also values the freedom that self-teaching has provided.
This freedom is reflected in the range of his work. Aviram moves between styles, genres, and materials rather than limiting himself to a single approach. He is wary of commissioned work, which he sees as potentially restrictive, and treats exploration as a necessary consequence of studying the history of painting. A new medium or style becomes a way of testing what painting can do.
Greek mythology and biblical stories are recurring foundations. Aviram regards both traditions as central sources within the history of Western painting, but uses them as active material rather than inherited illustration. His interest in abstraction emerged later. He sees it as a demanding form of painting, requiring both technical control and conceptual understanding. Art itself, including its histories of sculpture and painting, also becomes a subject within his work.
His key influences include Ivan Schwebel, Jean Dubuffet, Francisco Goya, and Diego Velázquez. Aviram resists reducing their influence to a list of formal borrowings. What matters more is the encounter with painters whose work makes a distinct and convincing world. He has also been shaped by a sustained engagement with Kazimir Malevich and the beginnings of abstraction, following a conversation with a curator from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem about how artists are remembered.
Aviram does not rely on the idea of inspiration as a mystical event. Ideas arrive easily, he says, and the challenge is to organize them through work. A question from his young son about Zeus led him into several months of reading and painting, eventually producing a large work populated by roughly four hundred figures from Greek mythology. The composition traces a sequence of intergenerational struggles for dominance, from primordial beings to Titans and from Titans to the Olympian gods.
His studio routine begins with the previous day’s paintbrushes. Before washing them, Aviram uses their remaining paint and medium to make free-form images on pages from a 1702 New Testament. He then moves among several paintings at once, unless a single work requires his full attention for months. The workday also includes photography, storage management, art-supply trips, and conversations with visitors.
One large painting began with an abandoned plan to portray a young woman. After the relationship ended, Aviram was left with a 100 by 150 centimeter canvas and no defined subject. He drew a pencil grid of 15,000 squares and filled each square with a circular mark of color, later adding a second color. Removing the graphite grid became a protracted technical problem. White paint allowed the pencil to bleed through, lead white concealed it but produced an unsatisfactory surface, and a pearly white layer followed. The final stage involved addressing tiny unpainted spaces around the colored circles and took four months on its own. The entire work required a year and two months.
The project confirmed Aviram’s capacity for patience, stamina, and long-term concentration. It also reinforced a lesson he considers true despite its familiarity: process can matter as much as result.
For Aviram, painting can suggest a more just and beautiful reality, not through direct instruction but through its organization of freedom and form. He cites Theodor Adorno’s definition of art as “maximum freedom for the components under an organizing principle that is as weak as possible,” a formulation that resonates with his own understanding of painting.
A meaningful moment of validation came when Marc Scheps, former director of the Tel Aviv Museum and later the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, reviewed photographs of Aviram’s work. Scheps lifted one image to his chest and said, “This is art.” While Aviram recognizes the significance of museum exhibitions and professional recognition, he measures success more personally: continuing to paint, improve, and develop work over time.
He is currently participating in a museum exhibition in Seoul. In November, he will exhibit at the Holon Institute of Technology, after which the exhibition will travel to The Stone Space in London. His work continues across several simultaneous paintings, linked less by a single project than by the ongoing practice of painting itself.
