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94 articles, 49 artwork images, 27 exhibitions

Deganit Berest, Israeli, born 1949. Deganit Berest was born in Petah Tikva. As a girl she moved with her family to Ramat Hasharon, where she studied painting with Rafi Lavie. In the 1970s, after graduating from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, she began to incorporate photography in her work inspired by American conceptual art. In "Dead Sea Atlas" (1976), for example, she uses a map of the Dead Sea from a school atlas which is increasingly magnified. The changing dimensions of the photograph blur the image. In the 1980s, Berest's paintings employed the arbitrary rules of early conceptual art. In 1989, she showed "Loch Ness Investigations," featuring pseudo-scientific images and images connected to the sea. The figure of a swimmer on a surfboard, first used here, reappears in many of her later works. Berest breaks down the figure into patches of color, similar to the pixels of a photograph or a pointillist painting. In this way, Berest erodes the physical presence of an object. From the 1990s, her paintings explore distorted vision and transcription of images. Much of her work is biographical.

Education

1973 B.F.A., Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem
1980 M.F.A. Pratt Institute, New York

Teaching

Since 1974 painting and photography, Beit Berl College of Art
1998-2001 Head of photography department, Beit Berl College of Art

Awards And Prizes

1978 Scholarship for studies in the USA, America-Israel Cultural Foundation
1987 The Israel Discount Bank Prize for an Israeli Artist, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
1988 Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Ministry of Education and Culture
1990 The Histadrut Prize
1991 George and Janet Jaffin Prize for Excellence in Plastic Arts, America-Israel Cultural Foundation
1993 Mid-America Art Association Award
1993 Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
2000 Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Isracard Prize, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
2005 Prize for Plastic Arts, Ministry of Education
2007 Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa
2012 Ruth and Baruch Rapaport Prize for an established artist, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv