Acrylic modern paintings

The painting is engulfing as a result of being primitive, free from justification and the sense of guilt for not being intellectual. It comes from the unconscious creative the psychological drive which is not adapted to a language of nuances and does not require decoding. Mirits spectator is bombarded with a colorful abundance, with repeating images and metaphors that are easily perceived and identified. For the person who is accustomed to the sophisticated art form, this is a fresh breath of immediate beauty. Perhaps this is the place and the time to go deeper into the roots of a culture which for generations now has been obscured with theories and isms.

David Gerstein

Mirit Ben Nun: Shortness of breath ‘Shortness of breath’ is not only a sign of physical weakness, it is a metaphor for a mental state of strong desire that knows no repletion; more and more, an unbearable glut, without repose. Mirit Ben Nun’s type of work on the other hand requires an abundance of patience. This is a Sisyphean work (requiring hard labor) of marking lines and dots, filling every empty millimeter with brilliant blots. Therefore we are facing a paradox or a logical conflict. A patient and effortful work that stems from an urgent need to cover and fill, to adorn and coat. Her craft of layering reaches a state of a continuous ceremonial ritual. This ritual digests every object into itself – useful or discarded — available and ordinary or rare and exceptional — they submit and devote to the overlay work. Mirit BN gathers scrap off the streets — cardboard rolls of fabric, assortments of wooden boards and pieces, plates and planks — and constructs a new link, her own syntax, which she alone is fully responsible for. The new combination — a type of a sculptural construction — goes through a process of patching by the act of painting. In fact Mirit regards her three dimensional objects as a platform for painting, with a uniform continuity, even if it has obstacles, mounds and valleys. These objects beg her to paint, to lay down colors, to set in motion an intricate weave of abstract patterns that at times finds itself wandering the contours of human images and sometimes — not. In those cases what is left is the monotonous activity of running the patterns, inch by inch, till their absolute coverage, till a short and passing instant of respite and than on again to a new onset. Next to this assembly of garbage and it’s recycling into ‘painted sculptures’ Mirit offers a surprising reunion between her illustrated objects and so called cheap African sculpture; popular artifacts or articles that are classified in the standard culture as ‘primitive’. This combination emphasizes the difference between her individualistic performance and the collective creation which is translated into cultural clichés. The wood carved image creates a moment of peace within the crowded bustle; an introverted image, without repetitiveness and reverberation. This meeting of strangers testifies that Mirit’ work could not be labeled under the ´outsiders art´ category. She is a one woman school who is compelled to do the art work she picked out to perform. Therefore she isn’t creating ´an image´ such as the carved wooden statues, but she produces breathless ´emotional jam’ whose highest values are color, motion, beauty and plenitude. May it never lack, neither diluted, nor dull for even an instant

Tali Tamir

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 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

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.

Dora Woda

Mirit Ben-Nun paints women, who are called nowadays “career women”; independent women, who are not dependent on men or husbands, who havetheir 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 overpass withing the painting, implying 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 embarked without support nor formal education, on stubbornly making her own way, her own dream. She does that accompanied by a parade of women, who similarly to 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

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