Artistic biography of Roee Suffrin

I said a work is a mutation - Rochelle Owens - 1988

His full name is Roee Yossef Suffrin.

He was born in Israel to a Jewish father of European Ashkenazi (German) background and culture, and to a Jewish mother of oriental background (her family lived in Iran for centuries in a community known for its artistic culture) who arrived in Israel, as a child together with her family. Roee Suffrin is thus the product of two very rich, very different, cultures, reflected in his two first names. His parents always showed a deep understanding of others, as demonstrated in their respective professions: Roee Suffrin’s father is a guide who is much admired for his ability to illustrate the historic and cultural wealth of the Land of Israel; Roee Suffrin’s mother is a talented holistic therapist who works with psychotherapists, complementing their treatments. Suffrin’s family background played a formative role in enabling him to develop his personal identity, autonomy and ability to understand others. As he developed his personal talents, these dimensions found expression in his art.

Artistic Retourground

Suffrin studied at the prestigious Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, which is Israel’s equivalent of Britain’s Slade School of Art or France’s Ecole des Beaux Arts. The Bezalel Academy, which was founded in 1903 by Boris Schatz

and opened in 1906, was shaped by European immigrant artists who had studied in the art schools of France, Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Ukraine and Russia and who continued to move between the artistic circles of these countries, notably between France and Israel. These artists participated directly in every stage of European pictorial art, and had the same aspirations to change the world of art through new schools and techniques. These Israeli painters had close ties with the Jewish painters of the Paris School such as Marc Chagall, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Krémègne, Mané-Katz, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jules Pascin. Over the decades, the immigrant artists of Bezalel became the teachers and models of Israeli artists who were born in Israel and who did not identify with Europe or with the US, but had their own cultural and political identity which reflected the Israeli mosaic and its conflicts. The history of Bezalel was also marked by its own revolutions and rebellions, which were mainly artistic but sometimes also political.

The founding giants of Bezalel were followed by a new generation which also aspired to change the world of art and which called itself the “Generation of the Desert.” Like the student revolution of 1968 in France, this movement was linked to leftwing ideology, notably that of the Kibbutz Art Gallery, later renamed the Kibbutz Gallery of Israeli Art

After completing his studies at Bezalel, amidst the great artistic effervescence which had begun a decade earlier, Suffrin did not die in the “desert” like the generation of the exodus from Egypt but instead, like the few great survivors – Moshe, Aaron, Joshua and Caleb (and all the women) – he succeeded in developing his own original art.

Today, Suffrin’s work is known and appreciated in Israel and abroad, and has been written about in various outlets. His work has appeared in 12 exhibitions (group and individual) and he is considered a painter of merit.

If I can permit myself to define Roee Suffrin's work, I would say that it represents a light on the challenges posed today to Jewish anthropology in the current, unavoidable encounter between the following dimensions: art and Judaism, creativity and development, Israeli culture and Judaism amidst global human anthropology.