Merav Sudaey's exhibition space was transformed into a cave with painted walls, a ritual site for an ancient goddess. She draws inspiration from wall paintings in Hindu and Buddhist temples and monasteries, replacing all the figures with the image of one woman, her own. This painterly installation thus consists of a stratified series of self-portraits in which Sudaey examines her naked body as an object for painting while looking into herself as a subject. Applying diluted paint to the canvas, she heaps transparent layers one atop the other, which conceal or reveal spectral underlayers of female nudity. The two-dimensional canvas is rendered three-dimensional, as it were, as additional painterly worlds are waiting to be discovered under the top layer of paint.
Via monumental, larger than life figures, Sudaey casts her body into familiar images of goddesses from the history of culture. At times she is Nut, the Egyptian sky goddess, at others—Venus, the Roman goddess of love and sexuality, and at yet others—the Hindu goddess Kali, destroyer of demons and killer of ignorance, associated with destruction and death; sometimes she is simply Merav Sudaey, who returns a probing, defiant gaze. In this interplay of exposure and concealment, recognition of inner strength and a display of vulnerability, Sudaey unfolds the range of physical and mental sensations stemming from her being an offspring of Eve.
Merav Sudaey
1970, Nahariya, Israel; lives in Kibbutz Gvat
The works are oil on canvas and courtesy of the artist
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