Ofer Lellouche was born in Tunisia, 1947. He studied Mathematics and Physics at Saint Louis college, Paris. In 1966, two months before his final examinations he ran away from home to kibbutz Yehiam in the Western Galilee, Israel. In 1968, during his military service, he suffered severe hepatitis which immobilized him for several months. It was during this illness that he started to paint.

He first studied with Yehezkiel Streichman, an abstract lyrical painter, at the Avni Institute of Art in Tel Aviv. He later returned to Paris to study with the sculptor Cesar, At the same time obtaining a master's degree in Literature. His thesis concerned the work of Stephane Mallarme.

The late 1970s: Performances, videos, first self-portraits.

"A Tombstone to Narcissus" was Lellouche's first major work.

"The way of lyrical and expressionist abstraction, using the metaphor of a painter painting an apple, was to erase the apple and concentrate on the page. The way of new realism was to erase the page. I felt I had to restore the tension between the page and the apple, between sign and referent."

"The work consisted of two parts: a randomly chosen rock, and a clay sculpture which was a portrait of that rock. The clay was to crumble in time, while the rock, nature, would remain. "

During the coming years, working outside the mainstream of contemporary art, which determined that "painting was dead", Ofer Lellouche willingly went back to the sources of painting. He drew and etched self-portraits, first in a very expressionist way, using violent industrial colors, and then in a more classical way.

"A self portrait by Lellouche is not a portrait of Lellouche painted by Lellouche. I can paint you, eating or sleeping. I can paint myself only while painting myself. A self-portrait is more the representation of the face of the painter, an attempt to catch the act of painting itself."

In 1979 Lellouche did a few Video performances related to the subject of the mirror. "A self portrait on a transparent mirror" was first presented at the Tel Hai Museum in 1980.

"The paper is on my right, the mirror is on my left.I am the painter and I am the model.

If the painter wants to change something on the paper, the model changes his pose in the mirror. Often, the model anticipate the will of the painter. The way I place myself in the mirror, is as creative as the way I draw on the paper. A self portrait is always a performance. The mirror and the paper are symmetrical.

I started to paint directly on the mirror, using a transparent mirror and a video camera."

During this period, the majority of Lellouche's work painted drew and etched mostly self portraits..

The Early 1980s: landscapes

"There is an increasing tendency to identify painting from nature with photographic realism. As for me - the more I progress with working from nature, the more I feel that the photographic perspective is a disturbance, and that work 'by eye' misleads. At times, the seemingly objective gaze actually makes it impossible to identify the object.

I sense more sharply that the gaze is always double: That is, it is the gaze of the eye and the gaze of memory. There is a well-known story about Delacroix, who used to bring a live model to his students, but did not allow them to paint her until after she had gone. A landscape is on one hand what one sees - a house, a tree, a particular light at a particular time. You have to measure the height of the tree in relation to the width of the house to understand the structure and architecture of the landscape, things like that. But a landscape painting is principally the impression that remains in us from that landscape as it appears to our eyes after we have forgotten its details, or as we might dream about it. In dreams a most precise image comes into being, without our being able to accord it an actual form. It is a kind of revelation. In most cases, the purely optic gaze disturbs or prevents the revelation from happening. The eye alone is powerless to convey depth, even if everything begins with the eye. With prolonged contemplation, things are seen to undergo metamorphoses, which often assume a more intimate character - like something that seems familiar to us, though we don't know why. We have a sense of 'deja vu'. Certain details vanish from sight, while others take on a powerful meaning. These things become charged with a kind of presence, which suddenly captures the field of vision.

I remember that during the early 1980s, I went to paint on the outskirts of Jerusalem. At first I painted the landscape in purples, in pinks, in all the colors I saw in the natural setting. But when I'd review the results in my studio later in the evening, I'd be disappointed. It seemed that the Jerusalem landscape could have been painted in the south of France; it didn't convey the incredible density of the light as I remembered it. Then I tried using white while painting the landscape. On my return to the studio it looked like bits of plaster. One day, by chance, I left a copper plate for an etching in the acid. The result was almost black. I was surprised to see how this black landscape brought back to me the memory of the brightness.

The late 1980s: figures in landscapes

Feeling the need to go back to the figure, in the mid-1980s Ofer Lellouche did a series of large-format paintings of one or two figures in a landscape. These included "Adam and Eve" (1984), "The painter in Judean hills" (1987), "Self-portrait at Sunset" (1990), and "Self-portrait in a garden" (1991).

""Since the mid-1980s, Lellouche has intensified the encounter between the self-portrait and the space it occupies. In canvasses such as "Figure in a Landscape" (1987), which were shown at the 19th Biennial of Sao Paulo, or in series such as "Self-Portrait at sunset" (1993-1994), the artist's 'psychological portrait' is positioned in front of backgrounds with a vast, panoramic depth of field. The inverse proportion between the figure and the background brings to mind the moving way in which Lellouche described Odilon Redon's portrait of Gauguin: "The figure in the painting by Redon is closed in on itself, introverted, pointed, opaque from a surfeit of existence, floating in a space that is endlessly disintegrating".

"Striped bare before the exalted", Professor Mordechai Omer, Chief Curator, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

The Early 1990s: Back to the figure

During this period, Lellouche etched intensively, producing more than 600 etchings. He illustrated Stephan Mallarme's famous poem, "Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard", and published books such as "Panim (faces)" and "Ein Karem".

The 1990s: the ateliers

In the early 1990s, Ofer Lellouche painted large-format paintings, which he called the "Atelier Cesar",in homage to his former teacher.

"Passing through Paris after the Gulf war, Ofer went to see the place that WaS Cesar's studio at the Beaux Arts. He found it empty. Nothing remained apart from some clay models on their bases. Struck by the profound humanity of these pieces, he decided to make a series of works that would remind him of what he had seen, while recreating the presence of life in Cesar's studio...

One can better understand the sane ambition of Ofer Lellouche self portraits. Self-love cannot be dissociated from the love of man. There can be no narcissism without humanism".

- Pierre Restany, "Ofer Lellouche: The Hand that Thinks", Tel Aviv Museum Catalogue, 2001

Recent works: sculptures

Since the end of the 1990s, Ofer Lellouche has been engaged primarily in sculpture and etchings