Artist's Presentation Yoel Harel

Until the age of 13, Yoel Harel has spent his life in Bucharest, Romania in the impossible regime of the Nazis and the Communist regime in Romania.From this age and further, he is a resident of Israel. Yoel did not study fine art in university and began his photo career at the age of 17. After his army terms he became a press photographer but choose to earn his living in a different profession so that he would have ''free hands'' in producing art.

His first exhibition was in 1983 in Israel, and since then has held one or two exhibitions per year. His character is one of a ''the lonely wolf''. Therefore his art is very personal and close to his soul and ways of thinking.

Yoel sees his work as ''frozen poetry'' and views himself as a representative of Israel and Romania.

Yoel's yearning is to immortalize through the photograph itself and it's magnification, which strives to achieve remarkable size and monumental art: the trivial, the ordinary, the immediate surroundings. In these subjects the photographer/artist finds an endless source of aesthetic, sensual, magnificently colored effects, most of which are abstract to the viewer.

With human images Yoel tries to remove the mask that we all wear from the minute we awaken and to capture those moments in our existence when the face reflects the real experience, which all too often isn't joyous.

It is the ambition and skill of the artist to create timeless art, not with the brush or chisel, but with the photograph and contact sheet.

For daily sustenance, Yoel works at the Port of Eilat (since 1962-1998), and his last position as the head of the accounting division, and the artist sees this as the most natural complement adding perspective to the vision and understanding of a concrete world.

As a result of the terror bomb at Dizengoff Center, Tel Aviv, on March 4, 1996, at which he found himself as a passerby unexpectedly taking pictures, Yoel has returned to journalistic photography

Exposed Artworks

Photographic Art - 14 artworks