Ziva Jelin

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Ziva Jelin, debuting new paintings by the artist on the gallery's fifth floor. 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. Jelin‘s figuration is attended by abstract pours and cascades of thinned, aqueous paint—bringing together indeterminacy and chance, and gravity and time, with her representations of place. To create the most recent works in her series Night in Be'eri, Jelin worked in her darkened studio, harnessing photography to project images onto canvas. She utilizes archival, familial, and personal snapshots, captured during walks around her neighborhood, to render her compositions. Draftsmanship too figures prominently in her process, revealing naturalistic scenes whose realism exists in shared harmony and tension with her drips and washes of pigment. For example, in Clouds (2025), Jelin presents a familiar vantage of treetops, her photographic framing suggested through the immediacy of her asymmetrical composition. Composed of semitransparent paint, her dense clouds appear low in the sky, streaked with lines of falling pigment that are at once conceptual and referential to rain. Jelin has long worked in a restricted palette in order to focus her diaristic scenes. Her recent canvases notably reveal the artist using cool tones of blue and purple—a distinctive shift from her earlier palette in which hues of red and black were predominant. Jelin has poetically described this color scheme as representing her feelings of solitude, reflection, and the void following the attack on Be'eri on October 7, 2023—as well as symbolizing dusk and night. Streetlamps and artificial lighting are central to Jelin's nocturnal tableaux, illustrated by her austere white backgrounds, such as in Streetlamp (2025). Here, tall trees stand amidst a thicket of vegetation and a walking path, starkly illuminated by two bright lamps. The pronounced tonal contrasts between blue, purple, and white are accented and tempered by a sheer wide sweep of light fuchsia, lending an element of surreality to the landscape. Taken together, the new body of work on view demonstrates Jelin's distinctive portrayals of place and home, as well as her melding of painting and photography—through which she explores memory, time, identity, and belonging. A multidisciplinary artist, Ziva Jelin works across painting, sculpture, installation, and video to examine and convey her experience of home, place, identity, and community. Based in Israel, Ziva Jelin was born in 1962 in Be'eri, where she continues to live and work. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1987 and Bachelor of Education in 2002 from Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl—and went on to obtain her doctorate from Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, in 2016. In addition to teaching fine art, critical theory, and curatorial studies at the high school and university levels, Jelin has served as director and senior curator of Be'eri Gallery from 1994. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Arad Museum, Romania; Israel Museum, Tel Aviv; Ramat Gan Museum of Israeli Art, Israel; and the Tel Aviv Art Museum, among others. Lévy Gorvy Dayan exists to be a trusted and supportive home to artists, estates, and the creative conversation. Helmed by Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan, the gallery aims to use its platform and programming to enhance and extend the reach of artists, and to strengthen their legacies. Lévy Gorvy Dayan strives to use its expertise and influence to make all aspects of art accessible—and to connect artists, museums, institutions, and collectors. Through a tailored approach, the gallery strives to offer outstanding service to our collaborative partners and clients. Founded in art historical study, and informed by the contemporary moment, our exhibitions and publications endeavor to contribute to artists' practices and connoisseurship. Lévy Gorvy Dayan's spaces in New York and London serve as destinations for engagement, discovery, and inspiration for artists, the public, and clients—embracing the possibility and power of transformation through art.

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Uptown, NY