b. 1977 in Haifa, Israel

Guy Yanai’s paintings, though they acknowledge a variety of influences, feel firmly situated within a technologically-motivated moment. Building on the colour palettes of predecessors like David Hockney (Yanai’s Sad House with Sprinkler [2015] noticeably echoes Hockney’s A Lawn Being Sprinkled [1967]), Yanai plays with depth and perspective to create works that are at once flat and buoyant, pixelated still lives bathed in eternal Tel Aviv sunshine. His treatment of natural phenomena like potted plants embodies the conflict between the natural and the manmade, or the transformation that the natural world is undergoing in the twenty-first century.

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