Noma Bar is an Israeli artist who takes complicated ideas and simplifies them into graphic form. Using only a few lines and colors, Bar makes us look deep into an illustration. First, we find the surface meaning and then Bar prods us to discover the more complicated story. Particularly in his caricatures, Bar assigns symbols to each person, essentially exposing a side that's not often brought to light.
Taking a look at his vast portfolio of work, it's no surprise that Bar cites silent comedy as a great influence, saying it's like “telling stories without words.”
The Realities Of Alcoholism
Shoplifting
Beware The Wolves
Democracy in America
The Big Squeeze
War and Male Leadership
Green Entrepreneurs
Life Stories
The Enabler
Kim Jong-Il
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Margaret Thatcher
Dick Cheney and Princess Diana
Bob Dylan and Harry Potter
Michael Jackson (with a kid in his face) and George W. Bush (with a tortured Abu Ghraib prisoner in his face)
Queen Elizabeth and Dwight D. Eisenhower
“I've always found pictograms to be fascinating–they can tell stories just as well as words, and they can have multiple interpretations. So I began collecting them in their various forms (stickers, etc.), and I learned to develop my own sign language.”
