Yishay Hogesta

Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

Artist statement

In my practice, I approach painting as an investigation into how conflict and tension become material. I am drawn to surfaces that accumulate meaning through competing gestures, where instability is not a temporary disruption but a structural condition. My work begins outside the studio, through sustained observation of temporary construction walls that have become pervasive across cities. Over time, these surfaces collect torn posters, erased slogans, stains, and overlapping spray paint. Produced by many hands and without a single author, they register urban development, erasure, and competing claims to public space. I return to the same locations repeatedly, treating the walls less as visual inspiration than as a working archive of contested authorship. In the studio, I translate these encounters into painting by combining materials that resist one another. Industrial oils clash with lacquers, spray paint reacts against incompatible binders, and I work at a scale large enough that I cannot fully control the surface at once. Rather than composing a fixed image, I establish conditions for friction and observe how the materials crack, separate, bleed, and produce reactions I did not choose. The paintings develop through this unresolved interaction. Grids break apart, layers partially conceal one another, and surfaces shift between matte and gloss, becoming cracked, sticky, or uneven. When a work is finished, I experience it less as an image than as a presence: something...

Artwork