Best art from Israel by Mirit Ben-Nun

Mirit Ben-Nun develops a style where he tries to demonstrate the manifestation of movement, rhythmic repetition and the speed of objects on the canvas.In the process the artist often asks difficult questions or causes reflection without giving easy answers. Her curiosity, your open mind and a commitment to dialogue are her best tools to address your artworks.

These works often challenge our ideas about how art should look or how it should behave. Her art is not based on what was said before and does not depend on the academies of art, breaks traditions, and does not imitate the real world, it is an art that transmits through its works the inner world of the artist. Through imprecise and significant characters, it radiates different ideas about the reality of the world of human dreams.Mirit gives us a clear idea that art is not separated from life and from the real world in which we live, reflects thoughts with style and unique focus.

Mirit Ben-Nun uses lines and points as an expressive resource and does so by exploiting nuances and associations to their fullest. Some forms follow the same direction and others change constantly, even urgently. Its language is visual and independent of its expressiveness; it lies in the value and organization of its elements.

The ‘things’ of the visual world are unimportant, the point is the achievement of reproduction of the world and human nature. Constantly encouraging creativity. In this case pointillism conveys emotions by the effect of using color, points, lines and thus capturing the attention of the observer.

Dora Woda

There is no doubt that Mirit Ben Nun s art derives, like a refreshing meteor in our skies, from that very source into our over- saturated art of photographic images and messages. As a self-taught artist, she grew outside of the lubricated system of art academies and does not suffer from the search for meaning. Her paintings burst out from within her as a primordial need to provoke the canvas, to attack it with an unstoppable obsession that leaves no corner hiding. The need to self- express does not stop but wants to continue and flow with her spiritual storm – perhaps to silence the demons within.

David Gerstein

Mirit Ben-Nun uses lines and points as an expressive resource and does so by exploiting nuances and associations to their fullest. Some forms follow the same direction and others change constantly, even urgently. Its language is visual and independent of its expressiveness; it lies in the value and organization of its elements.

The ‘things’ of the visual world are unimportant, the point is the achievement of reproduction of the world and human nature. Constantly encouraging creativity. In this case pointillism conveys emotions by the effect of using color, points, lines and thus capturing the attention of the observer.

Dora Woda

Mirit Ben-Nun believes and feels that art is a vital and necessary function for human existence, it is what enriches the human race.

For Mirit it is her everyday language and her wish is that it reaches the one who observes her works of art and allows her to communicate her most positive aspects of creativity, worshiping the highest values of which humanity prides itself.

The artist is impregnated with the concept that there is no art without man, but perhaps neither is man without art. It is a kind of soul breathing.

Dora Woda

Mirit Ben-Nun paints women, who are called nowadays “career women”; independent women, who are not dependent on men or husbands, who have their own room, their own office, own studio (their own bank account) and their own dream. The writer Virginia Wolf believed that it all begins with “your own room”, a defined space, even a small one, that has four walls and a door and is all yours; there you can recognize the dream, and be who you are. The women Mirit chose to paint also have a key phrase that leads them in life: “Go your way and leave the doubters behind” (Lior Finkel-Perl); “Put an anchor of ability within you” (Imi Eiron) and also more concise messages like that of Tamar Ish-Shalom: “Do not forget to breathe” or of the economist Karnit Flug, former governor of The Bank of Israel: “Economy is not everything.” How true. Mirit Ben-Nun dizzyingly integrates all of this into her private career, a colorful and spectacular painting, which ranges from Aboriginal diligence to feminist consciousness. Ben-Nun adorns the successful women with a tremendous abundance of colors and patterns, generously and with joy of life she wraps them with ‘mandorlas’ (almond-like shape), which surround each other and create “Babushkas”. Like the women, so do Ben-Nun’s models split unexpectedly, creating intersections and interchanges withing the painting, hinting at new paths. These successful, independent, opinionated women receive a gift from Mirit: they are raised to a level of energy rich in particles, but one that plants them in the heart of it all, they are both the citron and the nucleus. They are the smallest babushka, the princess.

Mirit Ben-Nun, an independent woman, who set out without support and without orderly studies, stubbornly made her own way, her own dream, added to her a parade of women, who like Einat Paz, think “better things happen to those who do”.

Tali Tamir

‘Your Own Dream’ is a modern Pop art style exhibit of paintings of women, by the feminine spirit of the artist, Mirit Ben-Nun. The painting series of the women was created and inspired by the book “Presence. Impact. Leadership”, and the majority of the women painted in the exhibit participate in this book by Dr. Efrat Liani, published by Kineret Zemorah Dvir.

A free Spirit

Mirit Ben-Nun was born in Beer- Sheva in 1966. Over the years she has presented in solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in Israel and around the world.

When she was six, her father was killed in a car accident, leaving behind his wife and two daughters, Mirit and Dana.

Ben-Nun had difficulty concentrating on studies, which caused behavioral problems, and at the age of fourteen she dropped out of the education system and went to work. The colors and writing tools gave her a quiet private space and her own way of surviving. Creativity eased her tumultuous soul.

Until her early 30’s she worked as a telemarketer and for the next fourteen years she doodled and doodled. While talking to customers she filled thousands of pages with lines and dots that resembled hundreds of compressed eggs and seeds which she threw away.
In a large portion of each page she would pick a random word and would write it down over and over while concentrating on her hand movements.
Even then she noticed the rising of her need and obsession as she practiced the endless doodling and writing.
Ben-Nun testifies that the lack of artistic training to paint “correctly” freed her from adhering to the rules of painting and allowed her freedom and spirit of rebellion.

In 1998, she received a bunch of canvases and acrylic paints as a gift from her sister.

She brought the acrylic into her world of lines and dots; she went back to painting women and masks that appeared in her childhood paintings and flooded them with lines and dots without separating body and background.

This is also the moment when Ben-Nun began to refer to herself as a painter.

and when art became the center of her life.

The intense colors in Ben-Nun’s paintings sweep the viewer into a sensual experience. The viewer traces the surge of dots and lines formed in packed layers of paint. The movement leads to a kind of female-male hormonal dance within the human body and to a communion with an artistic experience of instinct, passion, conceiving and birth.

Contributing to this experience is the wealth of characteristics reminiscent of tribal art. Ben-Nun merges these with a humorous and kicking contemporary Western Pop art. In the language of unique art, Ben-Nun creates an unconventional conversation between past and present cultures.

It is evident that the paintings emerge from a regenerated need and desire, a force that erupts from her soul, a subconscious survival instinct to which she cannot or does not want to resist.

Ben-Nun places women at the center stage where they are her work focus. The paintings obsessively deal with the existential experience of being a woman in the world. A few of the women’s paintings carry feminist slogans stressing the women’s struggle in society, a critique for being held to perfection and being required to perform as a model of “beauty, purity and motherhood”. Feminism pulsates in Ben-Nun’s psyche, through her diverse female images and the play between beauty and unsightliness; Ben-Nun assimilates the consciousness of feminine possibility, of not being “perfect”, of being powerful, influential, and outside social norms. This mandates a departure from acceptable limitations where Ben-Nun creates a new world of free spirit for women.

Mirit Ben-Nun is a mother of three and the grandmother of three grandchildren.

Mirela Tal