About
Ziva Jelin was born in 1962 in Kibbutz Be’eri, where she has lived and worked ever since. She holds a Master’s degree and PhD from Bar Ilan University (2006-2016), a B.Ed from Hamidrasha Bet Berl (1999-2002), and a Bachelor of Arts degree at Hamidrasha (1984-1987).
She was the director and curator of the Be’eri Gallery (1993-2023), teacher of arts at Nofei Habsor high school (1987-2021), Professor of theoretical issues in contemporary art, curatorship and arts at Sapir College (from 1999) , and Head of Arts Studies at Kaye Education College in Be’er Sheva (2019-2025).
She has exhibited in many galleries in Israel since 1990, including at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2005) and the Israel Museum of Art (2024).
Jelin’s artistic practice is centered on painting but also incorporates elements of video art , sound pieces and paper sculptures. She works mostly with acrylic and wall-paint, varnish and tar on white fabric, creating imposing monochromatic (often red , orange or blue) realist paintings. Her works are based on old nostalgic photos from the archive of the kibbutz or family albums, as well as contemporary photos of her environment, her home, trees, buildings, grass and sidewalks.
Jelin’s work develops a private language emerging from the interplay between the realistic image and the poetic and expressive elements of her paintings, between time and memory – the link between the place and the moment the photo was taken and its disintegration over time, where the image might be damaged, ruined, dismantled, may even dissolve, leak and vanish, wandering between memories and oblivion.
The color reduction cools the warmth of the sentimental and nostalgic materials, the shocking redness of the picture creates an atmosphere of unreality, drawing the oxygen from the air, making the sky heavy. The red freezes and suffocates the subject matter, at the same time as it evokes fire, fear, heightened emotions, and the erotic. From Jelin’s point of view, the redness expresses her love for the people and the land, of her kibbutz and of the Negev region. In her later series, the red expresses feelings of pressure and stress, like something closing in on her.
Jelin is inspired by the notion of subjective memory, the vulnerability and individuality inherent in the way each of us recall our past. We all recall the smells, clothes, environment, neighborhood, trees, and broken pavements of our childhood, the way it felt experience those fleeting moments that remain in our memory. It is this familiar sensation that words cannot express, that of a passing sensation that suddenly brings you back decades. We may not always remember accurately, and indeed memories fade and warp with the passing years, but through it all the emotions remain the same.
In recent years Jelin has worked on sculptures made of brown wrapping paper and glue, empty like shells, memories of family furnishings.
Since October 7th Jelin's paintings have turned blue.
