Tamar Getter

Biography

Tamar Getter, born in Tel Aviv in 1953, is an Israeli painter.

Getter studied at Hamidrasha Art School with Raffi Lavie in 1971-1972, and soon after began to exhibit her works and gain recognition as a promising young Israeli artist. In the second half of the 1970s Getter created a series of paintings known as the Tel Hai cycle. These works, which are dominated by scales of monochromatic colors and materials not considered "artistic," stood in direct confrontation with the images of the Tel Hai series that signified, in Zionist culture, the myth of Israeli heroism, images of sightedness and blindness, and of corpses and torsos. She worked in mixed media (e.g., photography and drawing) and adopted various perceptions of space in one work. This collaged approach, and the use of different, alien components to deal with "heroic" subjects distinguishes her art.

The conflict between logic and rationalism, and the expressive and grotesque dimension, appears again in many of the works from her late period, from the 1990s on, such as in the painting Double Monster (1996) or the series The Asia Society's Building (2003). In these works Getter reconstructs idealistic structures from Western art that emphasize the insufficiency of the human body, using squeegees of paint and mechanical drawing tools such as plumb lines. Her technique in painting tends to put together materials not usually combined. This collagist approach, which uses different and alien elements in the same work, characterized many of the artists in Getter's circle, Michal Neeman, Yair Garbuz, and Raffi Lavie, who probably was the artist who inculcated this principle in his colleagues and pupils.

Getter also studied literature at Tel Aviv University.

Getter lives and works in Tel Aviv.

Education

Teaching

Awards and prizes