Michal Na'aman (; 19 November 1951), is an Israeli painter. From the point of view of values, her work is characterized as conceptual art and deals with such subjects as the limitations of language and sight, the possibilities for expression, and gender issues. Using the techniques of collage, Na'aman has created works that examine the visual way of thinking as opposed to the verbal way of thinking. In 2014, she was awarded the Israel Prize for Plastic Arts for her work.
Biography Michal Na'aman was born in 1951, the youngest of the four children of the historian Shlomo Na'aman and Leah Kupernik. Her older brother is a noted Israeli archaeologist Nadav Na'aman.
She grew up on Kibbutz Kvutzat Kinneret, where her father was a teacher in the regional high school and her mother in the joint school.See: Dalia Karpel, "What I Have to Say About My Intellectualism", Haaretz, February 12, 1999. [Hebrew] In an interview many years later Na'aman noted that her parents' "non-pioneer" careers drew an unenthusiastic response from the kibbutz members. "My family was a little like lepers there," Na'aman testified, "and the fact is they were thrown out."See: Erna Kazin, "The Reign of Na'aman", Ha'ir, August 23, 1996. [Hebrew] In 1964 she left with her parents to the town of Lod. While she was studying in high school, she also studied at the "Margoshilsky" High School for Art, Tel Aviv.Rama and Haim Lusky, "Faithful Renderings", article with no cited source, Michal Na'aman file, Information for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem. [Hebrew] After that she studied art privately with George Shemesh.
In 1969, Na'aman began studying at the Hamidrasha Art Teachers' Training College, which at that time was next to the Beit Histadrut Ha-Morim (Teachers' Union House)See: Galia Yahav, "I am a Spiritual Center, Like Jerusalem" Tzomet Hasharon, July 5, 1996. [Hebrew] At Hamidrasha she studied art with Ran Shechori, Dov Feigin, and Raffi Lavie. Lavie's artistic language, which included scribbling and the use collage, and styles such as "Want of Matter", was adopted by Na'aman and by other students of Lavie. However, what distinguished Na'aman's work from Lavie's was that in her works there were textual images, cutting her work off from the separation of "form" and "content" that Lavie insisted on in his work.See also: Michal Na'aman, "Please Don't Read What's Written Here", Hamadrisha 2 (1999): 4.
In 1972, Na'aman completed her studies in the History of Art and Literature at Tel Aviv University. In this same year she exhibited some of her works in a group exhibition at "Gallery 201" in Tel Aviv.
In 1974, Na'aman exhibited her works in the exhibition "Five Young Artists" in the Kibbutz Art Gallery in Tel Aviv. The other artists who exhibited along with Na'aman were Tamar Getter, David Ginton, Nahum Tevet, and Efrat Natan, who knew each other through their connection to Raffi Lavie. On her work "A Kid in Its Mother's Milk" (1974), which was shown in this exhibition, Na'aman wrote a text that transferred "the religious, Talmudic law to a national, secular reality""A Kid in its Mother's Milk", Matach website, http://lib.cet.ac.il/pages/item.asp?item=19250. in both a private and a national context. The Biblical text "A Kid in Its Mother's Milk" appears on a piece of exercise book paper next to the text "A Country That Eats its Young", as well as in pink letters on the wall of the gallery.Naomi Siman-Tov, "The 1970s in Their Mother's Milk", Ha'ir, July 7, 1995. [Hebrew] The work was heavily criticized during the exhibition. Yehoshua Kenaz, for example, the editor of the Culture Supplement of the newspaper Haaretz at the time, described the work as "trickery".See: Naomi Aviv, "Michal Na'aman: The Double Head", Lady Globes, p 60. [Hebrew]
Another work shown in the exhibition was the photograph "Daughter of Israel" (1974) – photographic documentation of an "activity" in which Na'aman wrote a text taken from Ultraorthodox warning notices about modesty, on a piece of paper attached to her arm as a sort of splint. Na'aman's use, in a critical way, of Jewish traditions in her work was characteristic of other works she created during the 1970s.
Airy nuns and other species In the middle of the 1970s, Na'aman began to use collage and photography as a central part of her work. The use of photography as a central part of the raw material of her collages enabled Na'aman, for the first time, to introduce clear visual images of sexuality and sexual perfection, alongside a preoccupation with her real and fake identity. In her series of works entitled "Blue Retouch" (1974–1975), Na'aman made use of photographic images of Zalman Shoshi, Uri Zvi Greenberg, and of a female criminal whose eyes were gouged out. These images underwent a "retouch" using a blue pencil, that emphasized certain details in the photographs.
On December 23, 1975, Na'aman's first solo exhibition opened in the Yodfat Gallery in Tel Aviv. It was the last exhibition mounted in this gallery before it closed. In the review in the newspaper Al HaMishmar, Chana Bar-Or wrote about the works in Na'aman's exhibition that they represent "one long, difficult system of 'conceptualism' trying to break out of the concept".Chana Bar-Or, Exhibitions, Al HaMishmar, January 16, 1976. [Hebrew]
In "Vanya (Vajezath)" (1975), a collage exhibited in the exhibition, Na'aman uses a photograph of the legs of a woman with her underpants pulled down juxtaposed to a photograph of a ceiling fan. Sarah Breitberg Semel described the work retrospectively as a "strip show" by a woman whose body can't be seen. "All the viewer gets to see," Breitberg Semel remarked, "is a little piece of her skirt, that is, a little more black. Nothing else is on view. The fan, on the other hand, is photographed turning so fast you can see the hole in the middle of the blades. A kind of reversal is created between the male element (the fan) and the female element, with head and legs exchanged between them.Sarah Breitberg Semel, "Michal Na'aman: What She Did Here", Studio 40 (January 1993): 48. [Hebrew]
Another work that used a photo of a fan is "Killed a Penguin/A Nun Was Killed" (1975). This work combined an interest in sexuality and popular culture, expressed through a chauvinist joke,The joke: A motorcyclist comes in and asks "Are there penguins in the area?" They answer him, "No. Why?" He answers, "Then I killed a nun." with an interest in semiotics and the grammatical exchange between the passive and active voice. The fan, as Na'aman described it, "turns and, as it does, mixes white with black, life with death, penguin with nun".Michal Na'aman, "There it's Hot and Beautiful", in: Studio 53 (May–June 1994): 14. [Hebrew]
This mixing of different species can be seen also in other works, such as "Lord of Colors" (1976), in which Na'aman created a divergent and mistaken spelling of the name of God, or the series "Fish Bird", the beginning of which dates from 1977. These works had at their center a hybrid creature composed of photographs of a fish and a bird, taken from an encyclopedia of nature. The images were accompanied by texts such as "The Gospel According to the Bird" or "The Fish is the Joke of the Bird", which take their inspiration from Christianity along with a discussion of the questions of "Ars Poetica".
New York, 1978–1980 From 1978 to 1980, Na'aman lived in New York, where she studied in the School of Visual Arts, with the help of a grant she received from the America Israel Cultural Foundation. During this period the "rabbit-duck", which has been a central ethnographic symbol in her work ever since, first appeared.
The source of this image was the "Jastrow illusion," which raises the question of the identity of a visual image which was named for the American Jewish psychologist Joseph Jastrow. Na'aman borrowed the image from the book Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen) by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953). In her works from this period Na'aman returned to painting techniques that included the use of stencils and the dribbling on of color. The paintings, which were dominated by shades of red and black, were composed of strips of newspaper, arranged along vertical and horizontal axles, like a kind of cross. On the cross images of the "rabbit-duck' appeared, alongside of text fragments and sentences in English connected to the concept of identity".See: Michal Na'aman, "Rabbits and Ducks", Kav 1 (June 1980): 43–46 [Hebrew]. The works, Na'aman declared, were concerned with "the increase in genetic reproduction" in family images, and in the reciprocity of looks exchanged between you and the world.Michal Na'aman, "Black, White, and Multi-colored", in: Studio 79 (January–February 1997):53. [Hebrew] In 1980 Na'aman mounted an exhibition of these works in the Gallery of Bertha Urdang in New York.
"The Eyes in the Field", 1981–1989 In November 1981 Na'aman exhibited her work in the group exhibition "Another Spirit" in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. One of the paintings she exhibited, "Woman Gazing at a Turtle" (1981), showed schematic human forms performing various physical activities. The more "picturesque" aspect of this and other works from this period constituted an innovation in Na'aman's work. This was expressed in a reduced use of text, in a cessation of the use of photographs, in a more varied use of color, in the use of larger canvases, in the use of visual images taken from Western art (e.g., images from the paintings of Francisco Goya)See: Sarah Breitberg Semel, "1981–1982: The Family of Man," in: Michal Na’aman: 1975–1983 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1983), unnumbered pages. in her works. The curator of the exhibition, Sarah Breitberg-Semel, who was also the curator of Israeli art in the museum, frequently exhibited the works of Na'aman in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and other venues during the 1980s.
In 1982, a solo exhibition of Na'aman's paintings opened at the Israeli Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Along with Na'aman, Tamar Getter also exhibited her works. Na'aman exhibited large scale works featuring human figures alongside figures of apes, reminiscent of Darwin's The Origin of Species. In the center of the painting "Lloyd and Floyd: Siamese Twins" (1982), for example, Na'aman draws the family of man, which is being carried on the back of the father of the family in a kind of human pyramid. In front of them stand two parallel figures—an ape and a man – drawn in profile to the viewer.
Breitberg-Semel, curator of the exhibition, described the work of Na'aman in the catalog as featuring figures which were hybrid and grotesque. According to Breitberg-Semel, the painting of Na'aman makes use of a permanent set of figures that undergo graphic and color transformations which connect, complicate, and instigate conflict between one theory and another, one situation and another, one person and another, to the point that the composition seems to contain all the cracks pointing to its own pending destruction.Sarah Breitberg Semel, Michal Na’aman (Ministry of Culture and Sport, Division of Culture, 1982), unnumbered pages. [Hebrew] The figures from "The Family of Man" that Na'aman displays in her works, and particularly the many figures of children in her works, are characterized by an absence of facial expression and look like dolls or stuffed figures.Sarah Breitberg Semel, Michal Na'aman: 1975–1983 (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1983), unnumbered pages. [Hebrew]
A few days after the opening of the exhibition, just after the Lebanese War broke out, a bomb went off near the door of the Israeli Pavilion. The bomb caused a fire in Tamar Getter's exhibition and Na'aman's painting on plywood, "Blood Connection" (1982), was seriously damaged in the blast.