New Members 2023

New Members 2023

As part of a long-standing tradition, the Artists’ House continues to welcome new members to the Jerusalem Artists Association every year, opening the annual exhibition season with a display of their works. This year, three new members have joined the association: Sara Benninga, Yael Boverman-Attas, and Noga Greenberg.

Sara Benninga presents a series of paintings she created in the past year, depicting dramatic and enigmatic human occurrences. The scales, space, and multiple figures correspond with historical painting, a genre centered on a clear narrative and message, except that the figures in Benninga’s paintings do not have an external role; they stand in their own right, unbound by the dictates of traditional, Western-masculine painting. Like other representations in the painting, they are primarily devoted to the creation of the composition as a lively scene of action, and are influenced by the physical gestures used in large-scale drawing. On the material level, the paintings amount to bare, raw canvas, charcoal or chalk, and measured touches of oil paint. This type of materiality relinquishes the conventional painting method of covering the canvas completely, revealing a process that evolves from artistic search to the final work.

In the series Hallway, Yael Boverman-Attas charges her works with the tension between spatial illusion and the drawing-material act. Inspired by her childhood home in Jerusalem, the artist processes memories and impressions, distant and recent, to reconstruct the charged space. She elaborates, erases, and organizes the spaces of the kitchen, living room, and stairwell. Relying on a fixed architectural structure, the acts of marking, imprinting, and color application are used to create different perspectives, at times—antithetical versions of the same spaces. The shadowing and coloration in the paintings do not correspond with natural logic, indicating an internal painterly order; a firm presence of organization, harmony, and depth.

In the series Ordinary Days, Noga Greenberg presents photographs from the last three years, which originated in a lengthy process of tracing the everyday poetics of shadows. Through the seasons and transitional times between daylight and nightfall, the artist fuses mundane and sacred, cyclical and unique, the personal and the public. Corners in domestic living spaces or outdoor expanses, such as a view seen while stopping on the side of the road, are marked as part of a larger, silent and continuous movement of margins. Greenberg’s film is characterized by a color gamut of oranges and purples, and a granular surface. This material-photographic language records the expanses of the blurred reality, which transpires on the thin line between decline and recovery.

Meydad Eliyahu