Theo Tobiasse
Spent two years hidden in a Paris flat as a child, and painted exile and the Old Testament ever after.
Theo Tobiasse was born in Jaffa in 1927 to Lithuanian Jewish parents, moved to Paris as an infant, and spent two years of the occupation hidden with his family in a single apartment while relatives were deported. He worked in advertising for over a decade before painting full time, and settled in Nice. The pictures are crowded, high-coloured and deliberately unstable in perspective, built around exile, the Old Testament, women, Vilnius, and the memory of hiding — a personal iconography he repeated and reworked for fifty years. He died in 2012.
A market principally in France, with a substantial following in the United States and Japan built through gallery representation rather than the salerooms. Oils and acrylics on canvas lead. The main practical issue is the volume of editions: Tobiasse published lithographs and carborundum prints in very large numbers over decades, frequently on heavy embossed paper, and owners routinely mistake these for unique works or overestimate their scarcity. He also made mixed-media works on paper and painted objects, and signature is normally on the face.
If you own a work by Theo Tobiasse
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