Moshe Gershuni Portrait Poster - Israel Museum 1986

Artist: Moshe Gershuni (Israeli, 1936–2017)
Title: Composition with Portrait (Exhibition Poster Artwork)
Publisher / Exhibition Venue: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Date of Issue: Summer 1986 (קיץ תשמ"ו)
Technique: Vintage museum exhibition offset lithographic poster
Dimensions: 70x90 cm
Status: Excellent vintage condition
 
About the Poster
This exceptional Moshe Gershuni Portrait Poster is the definitive vertical format publication issued for the artist's historic 1986 solo exhibition at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The visual centers on a raw, highly expressive expressionist head rendered in visceral yellow, black, and crimson washes. True to Gershuni's transgressive 1980s style, the composition contains charged elements, including a painterly blue form reminiscent of a distorted Star of David on the left and the urgent text "חיים!" (Life!) scrawled across the upper border. Balancing institutional history with radical post-modern painterly rebellion, it is a hallmark piece of twentieth-century Israeli art history.
 
About the Artist
Moshe Gershuni was a revolutionary Israeli painter and sculptor whose work fundamentally reshaped the nation's contemporary art scene. Emerging in the 1970s as a conceptual artist, Gershuni transitioned in the 1980s into raw, emotional neo-expressionism. His paintings famously confronted deeply entrenched societal taboos, intertwining personal identity and homoeroticism with collective national traumas, Jewish liturgy, and Holocaust remembrance. Recognized with the prestigious Israel Prize for Painting in 2003—which was later controversially revoked due to political dissent—Gershuni remains one of the most studied, debated, and highly collected post-modern artists in Israeli history.