NATAN COOPER

by The Editors of Art Market April 24, 2019

NATAN COOPER

Natan Cooper. b. 1963 Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Natan, from an early age, began exhibiting an interest in design and drawing. As he began to refine his craft while working in some of the more prominent graphic design studios in Tel Aviv, he concentrated on painting images of urban life and its inhabitants.

He received his formal art education in 1982 from the American Institute of Art, studying with the master painter Yitzhak Holz. Natan began traveling and studying throughout America and Australia. While living in Australia he opened a Fine Art gallery and a glass art studio. During that time he practiced painting abstract art as well as designing and creating sets for television shows in Melbourne.
In 1995 he returned to his roots, settling in Israel, and began depicting the daily life of the religious community in Israel, focusing on the spirit of Jerusalem. His paintings reflect the uniqueness and special character of Jewish neighborhoods and their inhabitants. He has exhibited his paintings in Tel-Aviv, New York, Miami, Melbourne and Jerusalem.

Natan Cooper. Zone. Oil on Canvas. 180 x 180 cm

“All the attention and preoccupation of man is directed and concentrated in the body with all his senses and the world in which he is found, the picture seems to be complete and logical, The body is material and such is the world around us, naturally. In such a reality when I am lacking I am not particularly happy, and when the downside is filled, I am happy, but this joy is momentary until the next flaw. Something in me did not agree with this pendulum of joy and frustration. This feeling did not allow me rest and gave rise to introspection and the search for who I really was.

Natan Cooper. Art Market Magazine GOLD LIST Special Edition #4

The person I am perhaps being something deeper that lived within me that I abandoned and ignored all these years. In modern art and especially in abstract art we see very clearly the same frustration and the beginning of the search for the essence of this film in which we live.
When you take a classic whole image and begin distorting and translating it, it shows that there is a search, there is an understanding that the truth is not in the same realistic and beautiful figure. For years I painted realistic, almost photographic characters and over the years I began to deconstruct the characters until I was left with only a line drawing, I realized that the line expresses the deepest desire in me, the inner will, a line in Hebrew is from the language of hope.

Began to realize that the real self was the same. The line figures I draw are displayed in the background or scenery expresses a state of consciousness, like slides projected from the mind,
a thought creates a reality as you can say that as the person’s thinking that’s where he is at.
When you look at the painting you begin to feel that there is a hollow space inside us, that we are actually naked.

The delusion of fullness turns out to be like a set, a scenery that we are busy with, and we nurture it just to avoid meeting this hollow space. Only when you meet that inner space you feel and experience it from that point – only then does the real question arise: what do we really wish for?”
-Natan Cooper