Raphael Perez

Raphael Perez was born in 1965 in Jerusalem

Perez was born in Jerusalem in 1965 and grew up in a traditional family. His father introduced him to the works of great painters. He has a twin brother who is an industrial designer and another brother who designs jewelry.

He served in the IDF Artillery Corps. From 1989 to 1992 he studied art at the College of Visual Arts in Beersheba. For 15 years he worked with children in care settings and taught art and movement.

Since 1995 he has lived and worked in Tel Aviv, and since 1999 he has made his living only from selling art. His early works dealt with relationships between men and women, sometimes through flowers. At 32 he came out and began to paint relationships between men, gay families and LGBT nightlife.

Since 1997 he has painted naïve urban scenes of Tel Aviv, and also of Jerusalem and Haifa, citing Nahum Gutman and David Hockney as influences. In 2010 he made posters of Tel Aviv for the Israel Ministry of Tourism, shown in London. In 2021 three books of his paintings with poems by Smadar Sharett were published.

His work has been shown at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Janco Dada Museum and Zaritsky Artists House. Since 2013 he has been in a relationship with Assaf Henigsberg.