Yedidya Hershberg: All Thought Becomes an Image

All Thought Becomes an Image was the first New York solo exhibition by Yedidya Hershberg, a Jerusalem-based painter and the director of the Jerusalem Studio School. It brought together thirteen paintings from 2020 to 2022, most of them nudes and portraits, all in oil on canvas mounted on wood.

The show was introduced by an essay by Naomi Grant, who described a painter drawing on both observation and invention but answering, in the end, to what the picture itself demands. In Nudes at Abu Tor, she noted, the architecture and furniture set the scale and perspective with a solidity she likened to Sassetta's altarpieces, while the bodies owe something to Ingres. In the single-figure paintings a black armchair often frames the sitter's silhouette, and in Nude with Blackbuck and Transfiguration a wounded antelope, borrowed from Mughal art, adds a note of discord. "Painting is, he insists, its own art of fiction," Grant wrote.

Hershberg was born in Jerusalem in 1988 to the painters Israel Hershberg and Yael Scalia. He joined the Jerusalem Studio School's full-time Master Class at 18, lived and worked in Brooklyn for three years and earned an MFA from the University of New Hampshire in 2014 before returning to Israel to reestablish the school. The exhibition was on view through August 27, 2022.