Woman paintings

These paintings express a personal need to delineate images and fantasies abundant with color and emotional explosion. Signs, lines and the materials appear of their own volition

and develop as an external language bridging the eye, the hand and the painted surface. During the making of a painting the power of the shapes emanate from an unconscious and concealed inner dimension.

Ami Steinitz

Line by line, painting after painting while repeating shapes and patterns, a creation evolves into new shapes and patterns. With a determination that reaches obsession, Mirit

Ben-Nun keeps on returning to her art of meticulous decoration. A strong presence of primitive ornamentation provides the artwork with a tribal facet on one hand and a

feminine touch on the other, encompassing embroidery, bead threading and weaving among others. Ben- Nun’s beautifying urge carries within it an archetypal strata, mythic at times, which empowers her authentic expression.

Dr. Gidion Ofrat

‘Painting Outside the Box’ by Ilan Vizgan

The flute raises it’s voice / what is it’s story? /   is it bad news or good ones or what? / It’s about everything and all A poem by  Nathan Alterman/ summer celebration

Mirit Ben-Nun’s paintings escape common description. An objective observation might describe it as contemporary art, though created by an upbeat young female artist, it is far from contemporary. This art possesses no “present day”  defining elements.  Mirit’s paintings speak in a distant dialect seemingly of another era and location.  By trying to pinpoint this time and place, we find ourselves wandering about without a solid grasping point.  Her paintings are laced with a fire-like sensuality and striking colors.  The naive and archetypal characteristics remind us of folk art.  Reality is lost within the ‘erroneous’ size ratio of the numerous imagery, similarly to tribal and native art in Africa, Oceania and Australia.  The surface is laboriously worked and replicated similarly to rug weaving techniques.   Motifs of Western Pop can be found in many of the paintings. This combination of Primeval motifs and Western Modern Art creates cultural and historical tensions between here and there, then and now.   Formatively speaking the paintings are schematically divided into colorful segments with no intermediate transitions.  Strong and clear boundaries outline the different areas, each is populated with a happening, opposing or complementing the one next to it.  In this fashion, for example, round shapes are confronted with geometric ones or human images with those of animals and plants.  Often the paintings are outlined with a   ‘frame’  thereby uniting the parts and creating an enclosure, like a window within a window.  As a result, unconventional compositions are created and shatter the conventional formula of the “Uniformity of subject, shape & color”.   The rule breaking strengthens the untamed quality of these ‘uncivilized’ paintings.

In the center of Ben-Nun’s paintings stands the image of the woman and the relationship between the sexes. Women are displayed as curvaceous, seductive images often in dancing poses.  The dance is used as a metaphor for courting and seduction; the thick red lips, at times heart- shaped, symbolize passion and love.  When it seems that the implicit allure isn’t sufficient,  the female image is portrayed in a frontal wide stance, in a composition that reminds us of the letter W.   But when the two images meet, the feminine and the masculine, the unification is complete; melding into each other, the images’ side view completely overlaps. When in a seated position the whole shape converts into the letter M emphasizing the complimenting opposites.  The protagonists – women and men – are accompanied by secondary characters;  symbolic images of especially fish, hands (the Hamsa) and eyes.  Those are prevalent in Middle East cultures and represent fertility, luck and protection from the evil eye.  Their presence in the paintings, alongside the lovers, implies that the matter at hand is not barren erotica and carnal passion, but genuine love that yearns for a home, family and the raising of offsprings.

Mirit Ben-Nun’s art exists within and beyond reality. She moves away from reality with aggressive and dense colorfulness which reveals an inner testimony of a threatened existence of women. The lines, points and shapes do not reproduce facts but emphasize the special charge of emotional coping.

Mirit Ben-Nun shows a rebellious spirit and tries to reach out to things not through wholeness but via searching for their expression and manifestation.

She explores personal identity and through it tries to define a complementary art, thereby illustrating the world and the nature of human culture. She focuses on the expressive dimension because of the exposure afforded by the uncontrollable moment that so much affects life in a rapidly changing global world.
The discourse between the inner world and the emerging reality is hyperactive and generates in Ben – Nun an endless sequence of works.

From the depths of feelings, dreams, anxieties and expressions arise rigid and exciting meanings of existence whose essence expresses adaptation difficulties and restlessness.

Dora Woda

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

Mirit Ben-Nun’s art usually exists independently of reality, she even dares to move it away. Her aggressiveness in the use of primary colors along with bright tones, reveal Her autonomy in relation to shapes. The lines, the points and the forms do not try to imitate reality but rather give each work a unique importance showing the emotional charge of the artist.The artist has a spirit of rebellion, new ideas, trying to overcome without seeking perfection, just looking for expression. Through her work she explores personal identity trying to redefine the art itself. Its purpose is to describe and illustrate or to reproduce the world and the nature of human civilization, focusing primarily on the dominant exposure of the expressive function.His art is made by an artist that reflects the complex problems that shape our diverse, global and rapidly changing world, trying to redefine art.

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.

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

These artwork conflicts at times with our ideas of how art should look like; of how it meets the observer’ s expectations. Clearly this art does not respond to the sciences of  the Art Academies, does not imitate the real world, nor does it use conventional perspectives.

Mirit Ben-Nun transmits her inner world and its sounds, giving rise to an infinite number of artistic compositions, springs of dreams,  an assortment of realities and perhaps her ‘Unreality.

Her art is connected to her life and the real world, it is a back and forth between herself and the spectator. Her thoughts are expressed in a unique style and approach.

Mirit Ben-Nun’s art usually exists independently of reality, she even dares to move it away. Her aggressiveness in the use of primary colors along with bright tones, reveal Her autonomy in relation to shapes. The lines, the points and the forms do not try to imitate reality but rather give each work a unique importance showing the emotional charge of the artist. The artist has a spirit of rebellion, new ideas, trying to overcome without seeking perfection, just looking for expression. Through her work she explores personal identity trying to redefine the art itself. Its purpose is to describe and illustrate or to reproduce the world and the nature of human civilization, focusing primarily on the dominant exposure of the expressive function. His art is made by an artist that reflects the complex problems that shape our diverse, global and rapidly changing world, trying to redefine art.

Dora Woda

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