ART CITIES: N.York-Ziva Jelin
A multidisciplinary artist, Ziva Jelin works across painting, sculpture, installation, and video to examine and convey her experience of home, place, identity, and community. Across her oeuvre, Ziva Jelin portrays her immediate environment through a lens of intimate experience and memory. Conveying personally resonant images, her landscapes and domestic scenes depict her lifelong home and surroundings in Be’eri, Israel—including pastoral vistas of neighboring buildings, trees and flora, streetlamps, and winding lanes.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery
Ziva Jelin’s paintings inhabit a threshold between observation and accident. Across her canvases, finely wrought figuration is veiled and interrupted by rivulets of thinned pigment, liquid cascades that surrender to gravity and time. These aqueous pours create passages of indeterminacy, their ebb and drift counterpointing the certainty of her draftsmanship. In Jelin’s hands, representation and chance are not opposites but collaborators. Her newest series, “Night in Be’eri”, now on view in a solo exhibition, deepens this dialogue. To make these works Jelin transformed her studio into a camera obscura of sorts, working under cover of darkness while projecting photographic images onto canvas. The source material is deeply personal: archival family photos, intimate neighborhood snapshots, and scenes encountered during solitary evening walks. The resulting compositions are rooted in the real yet never bound by it. Meticulous drawing anchors them, revealing naturalistic landscapes that coexist in fragile tension with washes of pigment that bleed and drift like weather. In “Clouds” (2025), for instance, a familiar canopy of treetops stretches across an off-kilter frame that hints at a camera’s gaze. Semi-transparent whites and greys form dense, low clouds, their contours scored by vertical drips that evoke both rainfall and the physical act of paint pulled downward by gravity. The image feels at once documentary and dreamlike. Color has become an emotional register for Jelin. Long committed to a pared-down palette, she has recently shifted from the searing reds and inky blacks of earlier canvases to the cool spectrum of blues and violets. She speaks of these hues as embodiments of solitude, reflection, and the hollow quiet that followed the October 7, 2023 attack on her home community of Be’eri. They also summon the liminal hours of dusk and night, when perception softens and memory takes hold. Artificial light punctuates many of these nocturnes. In “Streetlamp” (2025), two stark beams illuminate tall trees and tangled undergrowth, their cold brilliance intensified by a wide, translucent sweep of fuchsia that drifts across the scene like a passing thought. The sharp interplay of blue, purple, and white lends the landscape a subtle otherworldliness, as if the familiar had slipped slightly out of register. Taken together, the works of “Night in Be’eri” form an elegy and a homecoming. Through the interplay of photography and painting, of control and chance, Jelin reimagines place as both physical and psychological terrain. Her canvases become records of time and memory, quietly insisting that belonging is never static but a shimmering, ever-changing state.
Photo: Ziva Jelin, Dark Forest, 2025, Wall paint and acrylic on canvas, 50¹³⁄₁₆ × 78¾ inches (129 × 200 cm), © Ziva Jelin, Courtesy the artist and Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery
Info: Lévy Gorvy Dayan Gallery, 19 East 64th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 25/9-1/11/2025, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.levygorvydayan.com/
