Baruch Elron, Large Surrealist Symbolist Painting, Peeking Child, Moorish Architectural Arches

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Large Surrealist Symbolist Painting With a peeking, peering figure of a child dressed in red in a typical Middle Eastern … Read more Large Surrealist Symbolist Painting With a peeking, peering figure of a child dressed in red in a typical Middle Eastern Architectural setting. (unframed 28.75X39.5 inches) Baruch Elron (1934–2006) was an Israeli painter best known for his unique Fantastic Realist style rich in symbols and allegories. Baruch Elron (Barbu Teodorescu) was born in Bucharest, in a family of Sephardic Jews. Baruch Elron studied Painting at the Nicolae Grigorescu Fine Arts Academy in Bucharest. Among his teachers were the great artists Corneliu Baba, Alexandru Ciucurencu, Jean Alexandru Steriadi and Yosef Molnar. During his student years, Elron made several study trips to Moscow, Prague and Budapest where he spent his time in the museums, studying the great masters. In 1958, he was granted the Excellency Award at the International Art Fair of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A year later, in Moscow, he received the prize of the Moscow Youth Festival. After graduating from the academy, he began to work as a graphic artist, as a book illustrator and in advertising. In 1960, he received the Prize for Book Illustration at the Dresden Book Fair in Germany. In 1961, he married Lydia Elron and together with both their families immigrated to Israel, two years later. At the departure from Romania, the Romanian Communist officials prevented him from taking his own paintings, so all of his works up to that time were abandoned in Romania. The beginning in Israel was difficult, with the birth of the couple’s first child and the participation of Elron to the three wars that followed. After working in advertising and in the police reconstitution department, Baruch Elron decided that he could not dedicate his time to anything else apart from painting. In 1966, Israeli, Baruch Elron had his first solo exhibition in Tel Aviv, closely followed by many others: New York City (1967), Montreal and Toronto (1969). Between 1974-1976, he took part at the International Art Fair of Düsseldorf and Koln, in Germany. In the following years, he had solo exhibitions in almost all the biggest cities of Germany and in museums such as The Solingen Art Museum and Gustav Lubke Museum. He also exhibited in France, Austria, Quadrienale di Roma Italy, Belgium, Croatia, Abidjan, Romania, United States and of course in Israel among many other countries. In 1997, he received the ACMEOR Prize for Plastic Arts and in 1998 Baruch Elron was granted the Israel Jubilee Award, for artistic and cultural achievements. In 2000, he was offered the Special recognition award by the Iancolovici Foundation, in Haifa. Between 1985–1994, Baruch Elron was the Chairman of the Union of Artists of Israel. He also taught painting at the Herzliya Art Museum, the Warrior’s House (where he used painting in order to psychologically treat Israel’s wounded soldiers) and at the Popular University. In 2006, Baruch Elron died in Tel Aviv, leaving behind many unfinished works. Posthumous recognition Retrospective exhibitions took place in Israel, Monaco, France, Romania. In 2011 and 2012, several artworks of Baruch Elron were displayed at the International collective exhibitions “The Spirit of Art” in London and “Lights in Winter” (The Archeological Museum of Jaffa, Israel ) and “Israel’s Gems”, in the U.K. In 2011, Baruch Elron’s painting “Exodus” appeared on the cover of the book “Maranatha”, Niram Art Publishing House, Madrid. Elron’s art can be included in Fantastic Realism with some Surrealist influences. In the catalogue of one of Elron’s exhibition in the Mittlerhein Museum in Koblenz (1982), Germany, Helga Zahler defined Elron’s art as a “painted dream”. The artist once described his works as “Romantic-Optimistic Surrealism”. In the book “The Magical World of Baruch Elron”, art historian Miriam Or further explains: “The school called Fantastic Realism with which Elron is identified, was created in Vienna after the Second World War, but it is deeper roots spring from ancient history. Elron himself makes this connection between his approach and that of enigmatic expressions of artists such as Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel and Durer, Henri Fusei and William Blake. On the other hand, Elron links the subjects of his works to expressions based in literature, poetry, drama, sayings, maxims, fables and philosophical ideas taken from different humanistic cultures. His own fantastic approach is based on and echoes medieval art, the 19th-century symbolists, 20th-century Surrealist art, Viennese Fantastic Realism (Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, Rudolf Hausner etc.) , in addition to the Humanist and Virtual art of the late 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. Themes tackled in his vast art creation are the symbolism of the bird, Judaica, the Bible, the portrait, light and shadow and the myth of creation, the four elements of nature, metamorphosis, etc. See less