One of Israel’s most exciting artists, Tel Aviv–based painter and sculptor Eran Shakine creates bold portraits that place prominent cultural personalities in peculiar contexts or settings: Picasso fries himself an egg; Freud catches some between-sessions shut-eye on his chaise longue; Piet Mondrian enigmatically dog paddles his way across the Atlantic.

 

The first English-language introduction to Shakine’s work, Eran Shakine: Sunny Side Up presents a collection of fifty-five striking artworks that include depictions of artists, architects, and fashion designers, among them Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Mies van der Rohe, Vincent van Gogh, Marcel Duchamp, and John Galliano. Broad strokes and brief passages of text on otherwise empty canvases, Shakine’s renderings of familiar figures play with viewers’ cultural knowledge to produce an intriguing intersubjective experience. Also included in this volume is a series of Shakine’s portraits of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as well as a selection of works portraying cultural institutions such as museums and art galleries.

 

The works of Eran Shakine have been the subject of acclaimed solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, Brussels, Toronto, and Tel Aviv, and this copiously illustrated volume presents an outstanding selection of his most recent works.

Nuit Banai is professor in the Department of Visual and Critical Studies at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her writings have appeared in Artforum,Art Papers, Art Journal,Frieze, and Time Out New York.