Jacob el Hanani

Jacob El Hanani was born in 1947 in Casablanca, Morocco, but grew up in Israel. He got his education at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Avni School of Fine Arts in Tel Aviv.

El Hananis practice draws upon the tradition of micrograpgy in Judaism, a technique resembling calligraphy where miniscule Hebrew letters form geometric and abstract patterns. The technique is often used to decorate religious and holy texts. El Hanani creates his highly intricate works through the repetition of thousands of these Hebrew letters with ink on paper or canvas. The repetition represents a prayer, or Tehilim. Tehilim referring to a collection of 150 psalms expressing thanks, beseech, praise, love and fear, for God.

The works are created without magnification, and in order to avoid eye strain, El Hanani rests every ten minutes. The end result is a work of extraordinary detail that from afar, appears to be a pattern. They speak of the passage of time and the link between the microscopic and the infinite.

El Hanani has had solo exhibitions at, among others, American University Museum, Washington, DC; Acquavella Galleries, New York; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado; Winkleman Gallery, New York. His works are included in collections such as the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderna, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the British Museum, London.