עוז אלמוג (1956) Oz Almog

Oz Almog was born to a family of Russian/Ukrainian ...

Oz Almog was born to a family of Russian/Ukrainian pioneers (Avrutzki) and Romanian/Russian immigrants (Abramovich). After studying classical painting and completing his military service in the Israeli Navy, he studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

Oz Almog's artistic work is confrontational and provocative. In the 1980s, as a student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Austria, Almog took an active part with in off-scene underground culture in Europe. In the 1990s he addressed complex issues of human sexuality, totalitarian ideologies, consumerism and terrorism. In 1994, his Birth of a Myth (German title Geburt eines Mythos) exhibition took place at WUK, an alternative arts center in Vienna. The center was converted into a shrine with flags and a flower-strewn floor. In some 70 oil paintings Almog auto-portrayed himself in the style of Nazi art, classicism and social realism as a ruler and savior, as a naked, provocatively muscle-bound godlike figure, as a fiery agitator or simply with the stern regard of a stormtrooper, complete with leather belt and jackboots.

Almog’s 1995 exhibition The Psychonaut and His Mind Navigator, featured 360 oils, mostly self-portraits in the style of pulp magazine covers. The artist presented himself as a lecherous vampire drooling over a beautiful blond, a revolver-toting gangster, a crazed toy alien, or monstrously endowed porno star.] The same year Oz Almog undertook the project En Face – Not seen and/or less seen of/by, reconstructing the images of the famous visual artists by using an original collection of interchangeable facial features' templates of Austrian Federal Police from the 70s. This was followed by conceptual exhibitions: Blok Brut (auto-erotic deaths) and Blood Addict - Bloody scenes of Murder 1949-1960, presented in Janco Dada Museum in Israel in 1997, and Shaheed (Suicide Terror phenomena) in Limbus Gallery, Tel Aviv. It is a series of selected real police photos of fatal auto-erotic strangulations, extracts from the scene-of-the-crime photos, metamorphosed with real blood into abstract light and dark compositions,