Selected Works
Ofer Lellouche was born in 1947 in Tunisia.
Ofer 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. Ofer 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 Baldaccini, at the same time obtaining a master’s degree in Literature. His thesis concerned the work of Stephane Mallarme. In the late 1970s, he worked in video art and painted self-portraits. During the coming years, he drew and etched self-portraits, often in violent industrial colors. In 1979, he produced several videos related to the subject of the mirror. In the early 1980s, he began painting landscapes in addition to self-portraits. His 1987 painting “Figure in a Landscape” was exhibited at the 19th São Paulo Art Biennial.
In the early 1990s, Lellouche produced more than 600 etchings, illustrated Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem, “Un coup de des jamais n’abolira le hasard”, and published the books “Panim” (faces) and “Ein Karem”. He also produced large-format paintings, which he called the “Atelier César” in homage to his former teacher. In 1991, he returned to Paris and visited the location of César’s studio, where he found some clay models on their bases and decided to make a series of works that would remind him of what he had seen. Since the late 1990s, he has been engaged primarily in sculpture and etching.
Lellouche’s realist paintings are very intimate; he paints mostly self portraits and his close family portraits, also familiar landscapes. Although his style is realistic, Lellouche’s art works invoke the feeling as though he doesn’t deal with real objects but trying to cling to the last leftovers of the matter. Since the end of the 1990s, Ofer Lellouche has been engaged primarily in sculpture and etchings.