Avraham Kan was born in 1968 in Batumi, Georgia, and in 1991, came on Aliyah to Israel. Over time, he taught himself how to paint and, by 1998, began painting professionally. He is regarded as a Naïve Primitivist and lives in Bat Yam.
Kan is not the typical naïve artist. While his work embodies many of the basic elements of naïve art – autodidacticism, idealized scenes, bright colors, meticulous detail, flat figures, child-like perspective and scale – Kan stretches these aspects to the extreme. His riotous colors create eye-catching contrast. The flatness of his artworks collapses space and depth into a single plane. Kan combines the charming innocence of the naïve world with an expansive symbolism of his own creation, forming inventive and wild combinations. Whether merging characters from different eras of his life, or combining surrealist elements into his Tel Aviv street scenes, Kan’s work reflects a naïve heart and an unbridled imagination.
With the exhibition, “Tales for Teo,” Kan provided us with a series of artworks that weave together a wonderful and fanciful world for his young son – Teophile. His works depict a range of scenes – from his childhood in Georgia, to his Moscow visits with his mother, to his insightful observations regarding the Tel Aviv streets of today teeming with humorous characters and animals. In never-before-seen works on paper and board, many of them from the artist’s private collection, Kan portrays iconic figures, musicians and fairy tale characters. In his unique way, Kan preserves the optimism and idealism at the heart of naïve art while building a world and works that are sui generis to him alone, bursting with all the imagination and joy of a good bedtime story.
