Temporary Flood

The exhibition Temporary Flood presents new works created by Shira Kamrad over the past year, depicting dimly lit nocturnal scenes, dotted with lights that twinkle like artificial stars. These works continue Kamrad’s ongoing inquiry into the manifestations of light in painting. Even when she portrays external light sources—a string of colored lights, car headlights on a highway, a lamppost, or light emanating from a nightclub—the light seems to shimmer from within the painting itself, reflecting complex, perhaps even emotional, interrelations between darkness, light, and shade.

Kamrad depicts urban spaces—marginal areas typical of life in the big city—and turns her gaze to the incidental and the transient. She captures mundane, accidental moments doomed to fade and pass, uncovering beauty and pain within them. The figures appear solitary, self-absorbed, and pensive. Even when they engage in human interaction—whether in reality or in a cinematic scene—it offers neither closeness nor tenderness: the conversations are all but lighthearted, the encounter is far from intimate. In some instances, there is no eye contact between the figures—their gaze is cast downward, sideways, inward. One painting portrays two young men talking in a dark bar. Their similarity is so resonant, as if it were an internal conversation, perhaps between two aspects of the same personality or two inner voices.

Kamrad floods the canvas with thinned, translucent layers of diluted paint, allowing the phosphorescent base colors to permeate them in a dim, sometimes toxic light, like a memory that has yet to settle. The saturated surface dictates a painting that is fast and expressive yet sparse, free and liberated in its gestures, scarred with scratches of pain. The painted surfaces seem to dissolve into one another; patches of darkness and light merge and blur, evoking a somewhat surreal feeling, sometimes disconcerting, that oscillates between wakefulness and dream. It is no coincidence that her exhibitions bear names drawn from the worlds of water—Thick, Moist Soil, Dissolving, and now Temporary Flood. Water—or the sensation it stirs—is not only a recurring formal motif, but the way the painting acts, transpires, trickles, and makes waves.

Ravit Harari

Events in the exhibition:

Saturday 6.9.25, at 12pm | Gallery talk in with the artist Shira Kamrad and the curator Ravit Harari

Saturday 6.9.25, at 12pm | Gallery talk in with the artists Shira Kamrad &  Assf Rahat