Draft:Guy Yanai

Guy Yanai (Born August 21, 1977) is an Israeli painter, recognized for depicting everyday objects, including variations of plants, landscapes, and intimate scenes. He lives and works both in Tel Aviv and Marseille, France. His current paintings and works shifted toward "romantic symbolism," their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes, forms, and color. Yanai often quotes in his works novelists, philosophers, and filmmakers such as Marcel Proust, Claude Sautet, and Nietzsche.

Life and career
Yanai was born in Haifa, Israel, on August 21, 1977, to Moshe and Rachel Yanai. In 1984, Yanai's family moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, in the suburbs of Boston, a relocation as part of his father's career. The shock he experienced from the dislocation is one he's never forgotten memories, which he depicted in several of his paintings. In 1995 he moved to New York and attended Parsons School of Design, New York. In 1997 he attended New York Studio School of Drawing, New York, and in 2000 he received his MA from Hampshire College, Amherst. Yanai returned to Israel in 2001 where he set up a studio in Tel-Aviv.

In 2015 Yanai founded Yundler Brondino Verlag, an independent publishing company that focuses on artists' books, special editions, and exhibitions, with the graphic designer and his second wife, Aurore Chauve. In September 2020 he set up a second studio in Marseille.

Artistic practice
Bold colors, simplified shapes, and a flattened depth of field characterize Guy Yanai's paintings. In his work, the banal is reduced to geometric segments in a stripping away of references to the tangible world in favor of a visual experience more akin to digital imagery—drawing landscapes or everyday life. He often chooses still, ordinary objects and spaces as his subjects, to which he is exposed through his wanderings around the globe, flattening and abstracting them in a way that seems removed and objective.

Yanai has cited numerous sources of inspiration such as photographic, print media, and film sources, art historical precedents, and the artist’s idiosyncratic memories and chain of associations. Old, modern, and contemporary masters such as Mattise, Picasso, Cy Twombly, David Hockney, had influenced his works greatly. Digital imagery plays a significant role as well: Through television, advertisements or cinematography, Yanai chooses a still scene he reminiscences through, corresponding to an age of commodified goods and consumerism, whether via its material objects or ubiquitous images. The commonplace subjects depicted in the artist’s work directly reflect his idea of being rootless. This sentiment is a result of Yanai having spent time in numerous countries and not feeling a particular connection to a geographic location. However, as noted by Yanai, “Nowhere has so many advantages, [one is] able to grab and steal from everything.”

Executed with a dense series of narrow, horizontal mechanistic brushstrokes, each stroke across the canvas leaves an irregular ridge of paint across the top and bottom of the line, creating a slight buildup of paint above and below each stratum, resulting in a canvas that feels deliberate, handmade, and intensely human. In some of his paintings, Yanai deliberately leaves small areas of raw canvas, creating tension between every stripe as one coat of paint is used.

In Yanai's works, there is also the critical function of the variously sized facets and bands of color, which simultaneously serve as the surface ornamentation, the structural scaffolding of each canvas, and the infrastructure of form. In his earlier works, the subject matters were pieced into flattened, multilayered constructs that stood as fortified walls of paint, camouflaging any trace of the artist’s hand. More than exteriorizing an emotion or representing reality, these paintings concealed and camouflaged them, sealing them off behind a paint wall. In his recent works, the paint layers are gradually unfurled, allowing for a freer tone.

Exhibitions
Guy Yanai recent selected solo exhibitions took place at König Galerie (2022); Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2021); Praz-Delavallade, Los Angeles (2021); Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf (2020); Niels Kantor Gallery, Beverly Hills (2020); and Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa (‎2015). His work has been included in exhibitions in numerous institutions such as Nassima/Landau Foundation, Tel Aviv (2020); The Velan Center for Contemporary Art, Turin (2013); and The Ashdod Museum of Art, Ashdod (2008). Recent group exhibitions were exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, New York (2022); Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2021); Asia Art Center, Shanghai (2021); Maho Kubota Gallery, Tokyo (2021); Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); amongst others.