Guy
Shoham
Guy Shoham is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (1996). In 2002, he attained an MA with distinction from the Chelsea College of Art, London. In 2003 he received a studies scholarship to attend the ‘Drawing Year’ at the Royal Drawing School, London.
Shoham lives and works in London, and has held solo shows in Geneva, Vienna, Tel Aviv and London. His work is featured in private collections around the world.
In the 1930s, Shoham’s grandfather founded a family timber yard in Tel Aviv. His childhood memories are scattered with sawdust and towering stacks of plywood sheets. It was an exciting place in which to hide and play. Shortly after his grandfather, the patriarch of his family, passed away in 2003, a fire destroyed the family business, reducing the family’s documents and keepsakes from the past 70 years to ashes. These memories and events manifest in Shoham’s work in both formal and metaphorical ways.
My practice deals with beauty and temptation, the tensions between high art and low art, and between abstraction and realism. I aim to research and raise questions about the dichotomy of kitsch and modernism. This line of inquiry started as a personal quest, a route for escapism and self-centered investigation, and has grown over time into a conceptual investigation into the craft of painting and its position within the art world.
Some of my paintings deal with the illusory. “The objects of Trompe l’oeil have something of the same fantastic vivacity as the child’s discovery of his own image, an unmediated hallucination anterior to the perceptual order” [Baudrillard, Jean, Seduction, Ctheory Books, translated by Brian Singer, Montreal, 2001, p.62]
Sometimes my canvases can be read as the objects they represent. They become ‘doubles’, parallel to the real objects, and in questioning my practice I also question the world around me. “It is the appearance of the double, in the guise of trivial objects that creates the effect of seduction.” [Ibid, ibid]
My intention is to seduce and confuse, to entice the onlooker into a morass of make-believe. While I have built my career on the traditional fine art medium of oil on canvas, I have started to expand into other possibilities by painting on found objects and creating installations.
Guy Shoham is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (1996). In 2002, he attained an MA with distinction from the Chelsea College of Art, London. In 2003 he received a studies scholarship to attend the ‘Drawing Year’ at the Royal Drawing School, London.
Shoham lives and works in London, and has held solo shows in Geneva, Vienna, Tel Aviv and London. His work is featured in private collections around the world.
In the 1930s, Shoham’s grandfather founded a family timber yard in Tel Aviv. His childhood memories are scattered with sawdust and towering stacks of plywood sheets. It was an exciting place in which to hide and play. Shortly after his grandfather, the patriarch of his family, passed away in 2003, a fire destroyed the family business, reducing the family’s documents and keepsakes from the past 70 years to ashes. These memories and events manifest in Shoham’s work in both formal and metaphorical ways.