Mixed media painter Nurit Avesar works like she’s solving a mysterious, a topographical puzzle…taping pieces temporarily on her canvases – shifting her composition – making decisions, and gluing pieces down. She works within a shifting place of impermanence, a place where her dynamic illustration of the human condition is realized in colorful, textured pieces across the surface her ever-changing canvas.
Avesar’s process begins with painting acrylic paint on thick, white paper which she then glues to a large canvas. She then sands and scrapes this wavy, painted paper until sections are weathered to a thinner, velvety white, leaving a natural patterned effect similar to that of water moving and reflecting, exposing the mystery, the raw vulnerability that lies beneath the surface. She also incorporates lines of string and cross-hatched textures such as window screen and cheesecloth which she sands down until the pieces are left lilting like memories – fading and receding, but certainly not forgotten.
Nurit Avesar’s ‘Elemental Energies’
Opening Reception:
February 20, 2016 | 6 – 9pm
Exhibition Dates:
February 13 – March 12, 2016
Neutra Institute Gallery & Museum
2379 Glendale Blvd. Los Angeles, CA, 90039
Next in her artistic process, working with a mosaic of oil paint and collage materials – including rust, graphite, fabric, and painted paper- which lay mounded atop tables in her studio, Nurit works like a novelist, deliberately placing significant fragments on her canvas the way a seasoned writer inserts powerful words to tell a story. The bolder foreground colors have a recent significance, their hard edges exuding a visual dissonance which speaks loudly within the context of the soft, sanded backgrounds.
While painting, Avesar often chooses to scrape through her applied oil paint, swirling a bamboo wok brush or other stiff tool through the surface, leaving it scarred, yet beautifully so. This process of alteration subconsciously reminds us that as humans, our scars of mortal experience make us wiser – more interesting – and therefore more empathetic to others.
Of her work, Nurit states: “This body of work is about the process of applying and juxtaposing fragments of paintings in order to merge them into new and coherent images. The resulting, surprising visuals combine the arbitrary with the intentional, as well as creating fluid images out of fragments.”
Talking with the artist, one gathers that Avesar has learned – in part, from being an immigrant – how to adjust, make connections, and creatively search for solutions. This quality of human resiliency is very apparent in the way Avesar accurately depicts both tension and harmony in her work. Nurit states, “Those intriguing and complex surfaces convey vulnerability along with dynamism. Manipulating and destroying finished paintings in order to create new ones, invokes the reexamination of cultural legacies and historical events and their weight on the present.”
This robust body of work is dense with visual and thematic interpretations: the bright, round, lighthearted edges, play like happy leaves on a shining autumn day, the bits of fall colors gathering in our periphery. The lifting, imperfect remnants appear as fabric moths seeking light; paper butterflies drawn to pastel flowers – their light, erratic paths barely visible in the lines, the etchings placed expertly upon the paint.
Nurit Avesar is a visionary, experimental artist who delights in her dynamic artistic process, in the feelings of change, movement, and growth. Her abstract work invites us into its varied topography, where we can safely forego our tendencies to intellectualize, and instead operate within the grounded space of human emotion.
