Yoram Wolberger uses childhood toys and everyday domestic items to create his large scale sculptures, foregrounding the latent symbolism and cultural paradigms of these objects that so subtly inform Western culture. By enlarging this ephemera to life size, Wolberger emphasizes the distortions of their original manufacture disallowing any real illusion and conceptually forcing the viewer to reconsider their meanings. When enlarged beyond any possibility of dismissal, we see that toy soldiers create lines between “Us and Them”, plastic cowboys and Indians marginalize and stereotype the Other, even wedding cake bride and groom figurines dictate our expected gender roles.

"Wolberger’s body of work encompasses a variety of everyday objects; toys, models, appliances, furniture. His method is the painstaking manipulation of these iconic artifacts. Grossly enlarging, dissecting or reconstructing them, he overthrows their utilitarian context to expose associations normally concealed by their continuity with the environment. His pieces are at times ironic and personal, even tender, while at others they are highly critical.

Transformed beyond their expected appearance, construction or functioning, Wolberger’s arrestingly mutated objects stimulate renewed contemplation of their ideological origins and significance. Typically, his sculptural interventions employ three principal approaches for evicting viewers from their comfort zone of habituated perception."

Yoram Wolberger (b. 1963, Tel Aviv, Israel) earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute's (CA) New Genres Department. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and has been featured in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), deCordova Sculpture Park (MA), the Aldrich Contemporary Museum (CT), Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Museum of Contemporary Art (IL) and the Israeli Museum of Modern Art (Israel) among others. His works have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), the Orange County Museum of Art (CA), Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California Riverside (CA) and the McNay Art Museum (TX). The artist lives and works in San Francisco, CA.