People | Exhibition at the 16 Nidbach Series

7th exhibition in the 16th Nidbach series

Osnat Bar-Nissim Landau exhibits a few series of paintings from the last two years that reveal hesitation and examination as well as the fragility of an experience. Her works focus on erasure, as a constitutive pictorial act, it, allows a rebirth to occur at any moment and has a double meaning; it abolishes and destroys on the one hand, and creates new questions about the role of emptiness and nothingness in paintings, on the other. The emptiness as death, as an ending, appears in the series in different variations – as a white erasure, as a black opaque stain and in the form of concealing the image and treating its remains: the traces of a lying doll, the traces of a face and hair. In a series of blue paintings Osnat creates a relationship between two undefined identities: a woman with an elephant trunk implying male genitalia and a woman covered with a veil. Here the erasure is more focused and is used as an act of canceling identities. Osnat erases the faces, blurs the details and examines the tension between the identified figure and the required anonymity. In a process of gradual reduction, Osnat checks how little a painting can hold, and allows the thin tension between the painted and the cancelled to exist.