Benyamin Reich | A prayer for beauty

[I] was raised in a Jewish Hassidic family, with eleven children, and attended religious schools and yeshivahs. My father served as a rabbi in ultra-orthodox congregations in Israel and abroad. As a teenager, I was attracted to art. I left the orthodox way of life and moved to the artistic world.

In my work, beauty and aesthetics come together with the tradition I was brought up in. My goal is to capture the Jewish orthodox man as a beautiful and sensual being, in contrast with the stereotype of the Jewish religious man as unattractive and unaesthetic.