White Paste

Michal Ben Zeev works with papier mâché, wood, and paint. She gathers the pieces of wood while wandering in fields, groves, and on the beach, bringing home remains of trees that were chopped down, broke, or came ashore, and infusing them with a new life.

She cuts, shreds, and stirs the paper in her kitchen, as if she were engaging in the ancient female practice of dough making, a primary act of sustaining life and survival. When the paper crystallizes and hardens into a paste, it returns to its origin—to wood. The link between wood and papier mâché is immediate and homogeneous, and the materials thus reunite in a cyclical evolution as a shamanic act of healing.

Ben Zeev lives in a rural environment, surrounded by animals and plants. Her subject matter derives from observation of the surrounding nature, and her art is part of nature and the world; it is part of creation, woven into an endless chain of creating and being created, in a never-ending process.

Ben Zeev copies and reproduces existing or imagined forms which evolve from their own logic and inner patterns. As she dips her hands into the sticky white paste, she pursues the great plan of nature. From vegetal shapes, symbols, and patterns, she produces sculptures, which transform into creatures in the exhibition. Their installation in the space tells a story, stages a play. The creatures return to the forest in a silent procession, no longer forsaken, desolate branch fragments, but majestic beings shrouded in mystery.

Dalia Levin

Events:

Saturday 14.12.25, at 12pm | Gallery Talk in the exhibition, with the artist Michal Ben Zeev and  the curator Dalia Levin