Merav Shinn Ben-Alon
In the Healing of Divisions
Through March 31, 2025
Career Highlights
Major Solo & Group Shows
- Tel-Aviv Museum of Art
- Watari Museum of Contemporary Art
- Museum of Art, Ein Harod
- The Jerusalem Artists’ House
- The Jerusalem Biennale 2017
- Hermann Struck Museum
- Ha’ Kibbutz Art Gallery
- NordArt – International Art Exhibition
- Lewisham Arthouse
- Minshar Gallery
- Hamiffal Gallery
Collections
- The Collection of the Israel Museum
- The Collection of the The Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia
- The Geny and Hanina Brandes Art Collection
- The Collection of the Museum of Art, Ein Harod
- The Schocken Art Collection
- The Comme il Faut Art Collection
Awards
- Creativity Encouragement Award – The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, Israel
- America-Israel Cultural Foundation Prize – Sharett Scholarship for Young Israeli Artists
- Marie Fisher Prize for Painting – Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
Grants
- Culture Division of Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality and the Rabinovich Foundation
- Foundation for Independent Artists
- The Israel Lottery Council for Culture and Art
- The Ministry of Culture and Sport of Israel
"Exhibitions are composed of small stories. As long as you read the entire exhibition, you'll get the whole story, so it doesn't matter where you start."
In the Healing of Divisions
We are in a time of social, political, and cultural division where threats to our bodies and minds are increasingly prevalent. Seeking connection and compassion, Merav Shinn Ben-Alon uses her artwork to overcome divisiveness and isolation in favor of healing.
Investigating these conceptual experiences builds upon Shinn Ben-Alon’s work, which has become known for evoking the complexities of human identity. Through her works on paper, oil paintings, artistic books, and site-specific installations, she challenges systems of power that deny diverse identities and perpetuate violence. In this online exhibition, she employs figuration, symbolism, and abstraction to expose humanity’s emotional and somatic responses to trauma that are often overlooked, stigmatized, or silenced.
The collection explores the artist’s multifaceted practice, looking at works that manifest the internalized phenomena of the human psyche from across the breadth of her career. Using watercolors, ink, oil paints, and collage, the disparate mediums weave together, resonating and amplifying the same narrative over and over again. She demonstrates her profound capacity to transform personal and shared hardships into pathways for mending the pain of past wounds.
Ben-Alon accomplishes this by engaging her aesthetics to ignite deep visceral connections with her work. Her pieces captivate viewers with the brushstrokes and lines flowing from her hand, juxtaposed with nuanced details accented with splashes of red. They coalesce in an amalgamation of meticulous realism and spontaneous expressive mark-making that manifest the suffering harbored within the psyche and allude to the body’s distressed corporeal nature.
"Many artworks arise from an interest in an event that changes the way we experience reality, changes our perception of the world, or creates a void in our perception of life."
The artist takes control of her substrates through the strategic placement of organically shaped spots, often connected by hand-drawn lines. The inexplicable nature of emotions kept bottled inside takes on visual forms that slowly slip into the surreal. Amplifying underlying encounters and sentiments, she reveals how feelings still relentlessly bubble to the surface with a sense of urgency, passion, and intensity. Each spot is like a memory, especially ones systemically muted, that continue to influence people’s lives and their identities long after the mark is made.
The histories and experiences discredited, ignored, or suppressed by mainstream discourse emerge from her webs of imagery and gestures. In Merav Shinn Ben-Alon’s work, the invisible among us are seen, and stifled voices are heard—from women forced to remain quiet as their minds and bodies become victims of abuse to societal fractures caused by political motives that rewrite the stories of marginalized peoples, and even our individual thoughts and feelings, for which we feel criticized when expressing them.
"I wanted people to feel misunderstandings and confusion. Sometimes we feel uncomfortable and anxious that's what I wanted and I think some rewards are there."
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon (b. 1965) is a Tel Aviv-based multidisciplinary artist whose diverse body of work spans painting, drawing, writing, book making, and installation.
After graduating with honors from Bezalel’s Fine Arts Department in 1990, Shinn Ben-Alon furthered her education at the New York Studio School before earning a Master’s Degree with honors from Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of the Arts in 2013.
Shinn Ben-Alon’s work has been showcased in prestigious institutions, including the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Haifa Museum of Art, and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, as well as in notable galleries like Ha’Kibbutz Art Gallery, Tmuna Theater Gallery, and NordArt.
The artist has been awarded the Artistic Encouragement Award from the Israeli Ministry of Culture twice, as well as the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Prize.
Artworks
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Untitled (2013)Ink on cardboard
$850(h) 17 x (w) 18 cm
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Seven Red Spots and One Brown One (2013)Ink on paper
$900(h) 17 x (w) 21.5 cm
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Wall II (2013)Ink on cardboard
$3,000(h) 35 x (w) 35 cm
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Bright Red From The Past (2008)Oil on canvas
$4,000(h) 40 x (w) 40 cm
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Wall I (2013)Watercolor and ink on cardboard
$4,000(h) 35 x (w) 50 cm
-
Merav Shinn Ben Alon Balloon (2008)Oil on canvas
$4,000(h) 40 x (w) 40 cm
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Red Bath (2017)Ink and oil on canvas
$5,00060 cm (diameter)
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Birth (2023)Ink and oil on canvas
$7,500(h) 115 x (w) 115 cm
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Bending Over (2022)Oil and ink on canvas
$8,000(h) 200 x (w) 75 cm
-
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon Purple Rain (2023)Oil on canvas and felt-tip pen
$10,000(h) 213 x (w) 172 cm
Painting
I Have Nothing to Wear (2022)
Ink stamp, store tags, oil sticks…
90 x 90 cm
Lygia Clark and Sonia Boyce at the Whitechapel Gallery: Play, Participation, and Cultural Dialogue
Lygia Clark: The I and the You and Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation at the Whitechapel Gallery embrace the ethos of collective engagement by exploring
Dakar Biennale 2024: The Wake of Identity and Transformation
The 15th Dakar Biennale, titled The Wake, showcases the work of 58 artists from Africa and its diaspora. With an immersive scenography, the exhibition spans
Frank Auerbach, Pioneering Post-War Painter, Has Died at 93
Frank Auerbach has died at the age of 93. He is remembered in the art world as one of the most committed and unyielding painters
Basquiat’s Iconic 1982 Work Set for Christie’s Evening Sale
With an estimated value between $20 million and $30 million, a standout 1982 work on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat will be featured at Christie’s 21st
Ralph Lemon at MoMA PS1: An Exploration of Movement and Memory
Ceremonies Out of the Air at MoMA PS1 by Ralph Lemon presents over sixty artworks from the past decade—spanning dance, video installations, drawings, sculptures, photographs, paintings,
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum at the Barbican: Exploring Colonialism and Identity through Cinematic Storytelling
It Will End in Tears at the Barbican presents a hauntingly immersive journey framed by minimalist “film sets” reminiscent of noir cinema. With influences from Hitchcock
