Mosh Kashi

"Kashi's works demand active, prolonged observation to gradually decipher the painter's interpretation of the subject. the works dictate the time they require. Each work invites the viewer to set an inner clock while observing it. The slow viewing process also contains an element of surprise. Kashi's works invoke contemplations; they raise doubts and quandaries, without providing answers. They strive to sharpen attention, to indicate the possibilities of the gaze, to unravel thought without stitching it together again. Making innovative, fascinating use of traditional painting techniques, Kashi does not give up the act of painting, but his work draws on insights that derive from the experience and thinking of modern and contemporary art. The poetic and metaphorical value carried by the painting alludes, on the one hand, to Mark Rothko's color fields, and on the other—to Gerhard Richter's work. The painting is thus charged with layers of time and place beyond the here-and-now". Ruthi ofek "Infinite Painterly Landscapes"

In 2003 Kashi exhibited his works in Landscape Art Forum in Berlin. In 2004 he won the Minister of Education (Israel) Prize for Plastic Arts, and in that same year he received a scholarship on behalf of the Israel's state lottery for an artist book that was released for his solo exhibition "Cronos" that took place in 2006 in Noga Art Gallery in Tel Aviv. In 2010 Kashi exhibited an installation in his solo exhibition “There Golden Island” that took place in Bialik house Museum, Tel Aviv. In 2012, Kashi was invited to exhibit a solo exhibition of his works in the Tefen Museum. In honor of the exhibition, an artist book was released that was produced and support by the Tefen Museum and Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Kashi first exhibited in 1992, that year he won the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Prize for a young artist. In 1994 he won the young artist prize from the Science and Technology Minister of Israel. In 1996, he received a staying scholarship in Cite Des Arts in Paris, France. In 1997, he received the prize for art encouragement, and in that same year Kashi started to hold a position as a lecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.

Mosh Kashi (born in 1966 in Jerusalem) is an Israeli painter and artist. Senior Lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. In his works, Kashi raises issues that deals with painting in the contemporary era. Kashi's art has been exhibited in Israel and worldwide. He won the Young Artist Award (1994), Artistic Achievement Award (1997) and Ministry of Education (Israel) Culture and Sport Prize (2004).

Kashi was born in 1966 in Jerusalem to an eight-person family. His father Efraim Kashi was a construction worker employed by Solel Boneh, and participated for years in building the Israel Museum. At age 13 Kashi was sent to boarding school in the Ben Shemen Youth Village. These years later produced the series of painting "Cronos", and there he painted wide fields, dark and black from one side to the other. The loneliness, the difference and the feeling of a luck of home in his period of studding in the boarding school, sharpen the idea of the "Non Places" that later appeared as an repeating motto in his works that mainly shows fields, night vegetation, thorns and trees floating from grasping in the ground, as well as his three-dimensional balls painted in entanglement till the last detail, and in 2000 also the porcelain gold balls scattered all over the gallery space. Between the years 1984–1987, Kashi studied in The School of Art – HaMidrasha, Between the years 1998–2000, Kashi completed his studies for his master's degree in art and education at Bretton Hall College of Education in Leeds, UK.

"Kashi's paintings carry within them the anxiety of an encounter with the "sensitive viewer" signaled in the mid-20th century by Mark Rothko, the viewer whose gaze and insights seal a painting's fate: if the experience does not enchant him, if the dark shimmering tones fail to claim his attention, he may be astounded by the painting's technical virtuosity but will not emotionally enter Kashi's core preoccupation with landscape spaces that hedge in a dense, velvety darkness. As in the paintings of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), which contemplate the mystery of the universe through moonlight and the mist of a wide sea, Kashi too, albeit neither wearing the monk's robe, nor invigorated by religious belief, gazes directly at the enigma of light and dark, growth and withering.Bygone centuries have not weakened the experience but honed its reception." Tali Tamir, 'A Captive Darkness; on the work of Mosh Kashi'