Yair Perez (b. 1978) is a painter based in Tel Aviv. He studied at Hamidrasha art school, Beit Berl.

Perez’s paintings are characterized by their large scale and percussive, chaotic mixtures of abstract and figurative elements. Their effect is immediate and atmospheric. They look unfinished, imperfect, torn, and long to be fulfilled, inviting the reader to step inside and continue the thread of thought that Perez has begun.

Perez often returns to old works and paints over them, or adds elements of collage. His paintings are multilayered, without an anchor point – instead they embody a continual search that is at once visceral, visual, mental, and emotional. Perez is inspired by cubism, wherein a subject is visualized from multiple angles, creating layers of time in which it exists.

Perez dismantles, shuffles, and rebuilds figurative elements to create wildly distorted characters. He opens up the body, seeing it at its most grotesque and vulnerable. His paintings contain a mixture of abstract and figurative elements, but rather than see these two components as two separate modes of thought, the human figure is a frame of reference with which he approaches the entirety of the painting.

Perez received the Young Artist Award Israeli Ministry of Culture in 2014. He has presented several solo exhibitions at such institutions as Sadnaot HaOmanim (Tel Aviv; 2018), Hezi Cohen Gallery (Tel Aviv; 2016), and the Haifa Museum (2012). and his work has been included in group exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum (2014), and Festival de la Arte (Mallorca, Spain; 2017). Perez completed an Artport residency in 2013.