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Tamar Hirschl was born in Zagreb, Croatia and relocated to Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust. She studied art at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Kalisher School of Art and State College of Art in Tel Aviv, and earned her MA from Lesley College in Cambridge. Featured in solo exhibitions in Israel, Europe, and the United States, she established a successful artistic career in Israel before moving to New York City in 1999.

Upon relocating to New York, Tamar Hirschl became engaged with the cityscape of large scale adverts and signage as cultural signifiers. As a result, she began painting wall-sized murals on vinyl in 2001, using historical mural painting techniques as social commentary on how “messages” are communicated through the symbols of billboards. Additionally, she began to develop her interest in collage as a technique, which she found representative of the past in its archaeology process of “finding” and the present in its postmodern pastiche. In 2004, Tamar Hirschl began to explore the use of collage in greater depth with her Civilization series; three dimensional works containing human and environmental elements in aquariums of cast acrylic resin. Tamar’s Civilization depicts the clash between the natural world and the manmade, which has reached a global crisis. More recently, Tamar expanded this line of inquiry with her exploration of the symbol of the deer, which developed into a body of work during residency at The Cooper Union. Deer appear frequently in Tamar’s work and are representative of the fragility of all animal life in the face of human intervention. Tamar has also been an art activist through her engagement with public art. She continues to address environmental issues and advocates an ideology of “ecological balance” between nature and culture.

Tamar Hirschl has had solo exhibits at the Mizel Museum (Denver, 2008), Hebrew Union College-JIR Museum (New York, 2006), Mestrovic National Gallery (Split, Croatia, 2006), the Queens Museum of Art (New York) the Philadelphia Art Alliance (Philadelphia, 2004), and the Museum Center “Julie Klovic” (Zagreb, Croatia). She was chosen for group shows during SCOPE International Art Fair Basel 2008 (Basel, Switzerland, 2008), Sotheby’s artIs 2007: Israel Contemporary Art in New York (New York, 2007), an intervention in the 51st Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2005), and the 9th International Istanbul Biennial (Istanbul, Turkey, 2005). Tamar participated in the Cool Globes Public Art Project in Chicago (Chicago, 2007), and was featured in the Chicago Tribune. Her maquette for the Cool Globes Public Art Project was exhibited at the Clinton Global Initiative (New York, 2007). Tamar’s video “Plot” was screened at Lincoln Center’s Scanners 2007 New York Video Festival (New York, 2007). Her painting, The Window, was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center as the official poster of its 38th Film Festival (New York, 2000). Tamar’s work is in the permanent collection of The Queens Museum of Art as well as many private and corporate collections.

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