About the artist:

Shaoul Smira moved to Israel from Iraq as a child in 1951, found his métier in art and received his training in Tel Aviv, Israel at the Avni Art Institute. In 1965 he moved to Paris and continued his studies in the Academy Chomier. These endeavors progressed in 1971 when Smira attended the Antwerp Academy to study etching and in 1976 when he attended workshops in Belgium to study the process of cast paper work. Smira also attended workshops in 1985 at the Atelier Mourlot for series of lithos. Smira has been living and working in New York since 1978. Shaoul Smira is widely known as Israel's Chagall. With a vested interest in colour, his paintings are characterized by torn fields of tone, reminiscent of collage, on which drawn figures perform. Due to the lack of identifiable ground and the unreliable scale of his figures, it often seems as though his works are viewed through a broken mirror, while the stage he sets suggests a Bacchanalian inclination towards chaos. Smira embraces an ecstatic, arbitrary creatively that turns its back on the cynicism of postmodernism.