David Guez (born 1954, Tunisia) is a self-taught painter based in Jerusalem whose work has emerged as a distinctive voice in contemporary abstraction. After formative periods in Paris and Los Angeles, Guez developed a universal visual language articulated through layered color, rhythm, and gesture. His abstract paintings pursue questions of presence, silence, and memory, offering a vocabulary that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries.
Guez’s practice centers on large-scale oil works whose materiality and monumentality echo the logic of sculpture. Through erasure, repetition, and improvisatory brushwork, he creates surfaces that feel both immediate and timeless, as if light and duration have been made visible. His marks often resemble a form of visual pulse, intuitive, coded, and quietly insistent, inviting contemplative looking in a screen-saturated era.
Guez’s work has been linked to the lineage of Art Autre and American post-war abstraction. As Italian art critic Paolo Levi has written, Guez “picked up where Rothko did not finish,” articulating a chromatic sensibility and poetic unease that resonate with, yet renew, the modernist tradition.
His paintings have been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at The Hub Gallery, D&M Gallery and Rothschild 49 Gallery in Tel Aviv, and presentations in major institutional contexts including PERSONAL STRUCTURES. Reflections, the Official Collateral Exhibition of the Venice Biennale at Palazzo Bembo (European Cultural Centre, 2022).
A major milestone in 2025 was the moment two of Guez’s works entered the Rothko Museum Collection following his participation in the Mark Rothko 2025 International Painting Symposium. Guez’s visibility expanded further through his interview for Artnet, strengthening his presence within the international art market, along with his acceptance into the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (AICF).
Guez continues to evolve a painterly language grounded in both materiality and emotion, creating an abstract world where gesture, light, and memory remain in constant dialogue.
Art/Painting
