Yehuda Porbuchrai's solo exhibition (b. 1949), which is on display in the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art’s large gallery, focuses on a number of series that he created between the mid-1980s and today. It reflects key recurring themes in his works, as well as the unique language that he has developed over the years. Born in Persia, Porbuchrai grew up from infancy in the Israeli town of Ness Ziona, then moved to south Tel Aviv to study art. He began his art studies at the Avni Institute (1973–1977), and in the early 1980s moved to live in New York. Since his return to Israel in 1986, he has exhibited in dozens of exhibitions in museums and galleries, both in Israel and abroad. His paintings comprise a wide range of intertwining themes, colors and forms, such as folk art; images from European and American art history; designs and images from magazines and film posters; ornamental features typical of illustrations in Persian manuscripts; and the abstract patterns of Persian textiles.
Porbuchrai’s paintings offer a new Israeli identity, one that is hybrid and fraught with tension. In defiance of the homogenous cultural mainstream, he presented images from the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv (the old one, and subsequently the new) which, then as now, has always had irresistible pull on him. It is a world of colorful, dark, cheap and seductive Otherness and marginality; a noisy transit station with a riot of smells and sounds, ethnicities and nationalities. For Porbuchrai, the Central Bus Station reveals the face of the true Israel and offers a glimpse into its subconscious and the Israeli Other. Porbuchrai takes an unflinching gaze at the oppressed margins, at wretchedness and grace, at the common, warm and familiar, but also at the exotic and alien.
Curator: Ori Drumer
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