Michael Gross (1920)

Aliases: Michael (1920) Gross

Professions: Painter; Sculptor

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  A pair of George III silver-gilt dessert-baskets

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  MICHAEL GROSS

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  Michael Gross 1920-2004 , Reclining Woman oil on canvas

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  q - MICHAEL GROSS 1920-2004

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Michael Gross Biography

(b Tiberias, Palestine [now Israel], 1920). Israeli painter and sculptor. After studying at the Teachers’ Seminary in Jerusalem from 1936 to 1940, he studied architecture at the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa (1943–5) and art at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1951–4). In 1954 he returned to Israel and began working as a painter and sculptor in the artists’ village of Ein Hod. In early paintings such as A Roof and a Window (1966–7; Jerusalem, Israel Mus.) Gross simplified form in order to concentrate on proportion, on boldly juxtaposed broad areas of colour and on the size and placement of each element; a similar reductive process was applied also to his early sculptures and to later pieces, whether in painted iron or in other materials such as white concrete (e.g. the monumental sculpture at Simon Bolivar Park in Jerusalem, 1974). In later paintings such as Light of Jerusalem (triptych, 1974; Jerusalem, Israel Mus.) he often juxtaposed large panels into polyptych formats to build bold shapes of empty off-white fields and broad tonal patches; occasionally these were supplemented by the textures of objects such as wooden beams, burlap and rope physically attached to the picture, as in Female Nude and a Log of Wood II (1981–2; Jerusalem, Israel Mus.). In spite of the extreme economy of his work, Gross’s rough and freely-brushed surfaces and his consistent use of soft pastel colouring suggest a direct link with the Israeli landscape.

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