"I was one year and eleven months old when dad disappeared from my life. I spent my entire childhood waiting for him to return, praying for a single instant of memory to leave an image in my heart, a tangible mnemonic fragment – but to no avail. In my twenties, I began experiencing mental crises, accompanied by prolonged therapy. Thus, I worked through as an adult what I could not as a very small child – coping with loss." (Vered Nahmani)
Painting is Home by Vered Nahmani (b. 1971) sheds light on the act of drawing and on the value of the home as two interrelated and complementary motifs in her oeuvre. It includes painting series created since she has graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 1997. These series all coalesce around the themes of family, bereavement and memory; reflect the concrete reality of the Israeli indoors, courtyard and landscape; and reveal dialectic tensions between figurative and abstract, controlled and intuitive, conscious and unconscious painting. The exhibition also includes works by sculptor Zvika Cantor and painter Orna Bromberg, whom Nahmani has adopted as her artistic father and mother whose works open up an additional interpretive space for her own body of works and position in Israeli art.
Vered Nachmani
Painting is home
Curator: Yaniv Shapira
March-July 2018