Born in 1952 in Tel Aviv, Nurit David is one of Israel’s most preeminent visual artists. Since 1982 she has worked with the Givon Gallery and exhibited in many places. Her works can also be found in the public collections of museums such as the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum of New York.
Her works are mostly paintings, but she has also created installations. Nurit’s themes and style have morphed throughout her career, but one thing has remained constant: the creation of a sensitive and personal organic architectural visual path which defines a whole world in each painting is what describes her body of work best.
We were honored to be able to interview Nurit and to get her insight into art, inspiration and her career.
What can you tell us about your background? How did you become interested in art and how did you take on it professionally?
Nurit David: My parents immigrated to Israel from Hungary in 1949 and I was born 3 years later. As a child and as an adolescent I wished to be a writer – either a poet or a playwright. It was a very vague idea though, being without any real talent or knowledge of what it entails. In my early adolescence I used to copy paintings from reproductions, mainly impressionists.
I went to art school relatively late, at the age of 23, and studied with two quite radical up to date teachers. I was positively shocked to learn that you can make paintings from writing and I finished school writing long texts on white bed sheets. I started to participate in group exhibitions while still a student and had my first solo show a year after graduating, in 1979.
Three years later I was approached by Noemi Givon and started to work with Givon Gallery and 35 years later, I’m still there.
Installation, 2017
Who are your favorite painters and artists from other fields?
Nurit David: When I look back at the winding path that my art has taken along the years, what is most evident are the big changes in style, in subject matter, in materials and also in sources of influence. Almost each series has its admired artists. For example, when I worked on the Lanscapes from 1999-2001 I was completely absorbed in Flemish landscape painters like Joachim Patinir and Herri Met de Bles, or when I started to paint the human figure in the mid 90s, the English school, which I really disliked before, became a source of inspiration and encouragement, mainly Stanley Spencer. Giorgio de Chirico was important, and later, Japanese traditional painting with its special rendering of space.
I can love artists whose work has nothing to do with mine – like Jean Fautrier or Franz West.
My main influences come from literature – Georg Buechner, Joyce and Eliot, Yosef Haim Brenner, Natsume Soseki and the list is endless. Cinema is also important – to mention only the three greatest directors in my opinion – Yasujiro Ozu, Eric Rohmer and Abbas Kiarostami.
What are the main themes you explore in your works?
Nurit David: Art, and painting especially, being framed, was a means to create a sense of place – I almost see painting as a construction site. You have a piece of land and it has to contain various functions, put side by side, arranged so that their encounter will be a meaningful one.
This place should include elements of time as well and writing was very important for me along the years, not just actual writing in paintings, but the whole process of my building a painting was more literary than painterly – elements followed each other like letters of an alphabet.
As part of this literary approach, family came to be an almost obvious subject matter. This small basic unit of life seems to be an inexhaustible source of materials. The most challenging and intriguing for me is the father – daughter relationship which includes relationships with all kinds of father figures, probably even having a touch of religious implication.
The father – daughter relationship includes for me the appropriation of the working tools of the father by the daughter, and this brings me to the importance of shape, especially in my last two series of works that have a tendency towards abstraction.
Your paintings often portray serious themes or events, but in a somewhat caricatural, joyful way. Why do you use this approach?
Nurit David: I think that this tendency has become more evident during the last years, it’s part of the process of getting old and taking life less seriously. It has also a lot to do with my turning my back on Europe and facing Japan and the East. Since the death of my Japanese boyfriend in 2004 I became deeply involved in Japanese culture and part of it was the adoption (not always successfully) of a somewhat zen attitude.
If I’m allowed to make this generalization, then Europe provided me with the means to express suffering and usually through mock, irony and sarcasm, while the East brought sincerity and humor.
Can it be said that you work a lot with metaphors in your paintings?
Nurit David: I guess it has to do with my overall literary approach to visual art. Some of the main metaphors that kept recurring over the years are: agriculture and tilling the land as a metaphor of the work of painting, stairs and staircases as a metaphor of movement, gradual change and transformation, trees or tree branches as a metaphor of writing, puppets as a metaphor of the alienation of the body but also of taking apart and assembling which is the mechanics of the work of art and the city as a metaphor of the self.
A special place is reserved in my process of thinking to the sister of metaphor: the metonymy, which is less about similarity and more about connecting things through physical proximity. I love to create association between images by letting them touch each other. I see the work of painting as putting things side by side. Examples of stimulating meetings of this kind are: tips of fingers touching the letters of the alphabet, pieces of paper torn from a magazine (and painted à la trompe l’oeil) placed inside a shoe, tiny porcelain figurines assimilated into a detailed landscape.
I can also mention the third sister, the synecdoche, by which a foot print can stand for an absent father, a piece of clothing stand for a figure, a cabbage for a head, a bottle for a baby.
When it comes to your more abstract works, how would you describe your process of abstractization?
Nurit David: My tendency towards abstraction in the last 4-5 years is partly a reaction against the abuse of “content” by the art world in the last years. There is a demand now from art to be useful in a common sense way to society, which I reject. I feel that strong emphasis on form and shape can bring a fresh breeze into this suffocating politicly correct atmosphere.
Speaking practically, I’ve found out that a vector graphics computer software can be useful and much fun in creating new shapes. I then cut the shapes with a cutting plotter to make templates and stencils for tracing outlines onto the canvas.
Besides these templates I use ready made french curves and seamstress rulers that bring with them associations of professions that existed in my family.
Japanese art, costume, theatre and architecture with their simple, flat colored, outlined forms have had much influence too.
As a teacher, what would be the three most important things you wish to communicate to young artists?
Nurit David: I stopped teaching ten years ago and since then the art world has underwent enormous changes. I think young artists nowadays can teach me many things that concern making a career in the art world. I’m afraid my old ethics would not be of much use to them. The main thing I can suggest is always to be more interested in the work of others than in your own. And always to be interested in other cultural fields so as not to be stuck in the narrow slot under your nose.
Thank you!
To discover more of Nurit’s works, go to nuritdavid.com