Michal Mamit Vorka: Still from Life
Michal Mamit Worke, winner of the 2020 Lauren & Mitchell Presser Contemporary Art Grant, is a unique presence in the Israeli art scene. Her paintings are characterized by a stylized and controlled figurative style in a bold palette. They engage with scenes and people from everyday life that are depicted in the tradition of figurative painting in general, and realistic painting in particular, and probe its possible boundaries.
Worke addresses the discrepancy between painting as a mode of representation and its nature as an intimate act 鈥� between the painter and her subjects, and between the world presented in the paintings and the viewer and his or her world. Through the act of painting, with all that it entails, she seeks to decipher the gaze as an interchange of power relations that plays out before the viewers鈥� eyes.
Worke observes her immediate surroundings and tries to decipher the sight itself, the essence of the gaze. It is not a passive gaze but an active one, based on continual conscious choice: a choice to see the people, the situations, the interiors of the rooms, and the cityscapes outside; a deliberate choice to use traditional painting methods, and subvert them; a choice to enter into a dialogue with the history of art, amidst a determination to be instantly engaged by what is happening before her eyes. Worke cannot help but paint, cannot help but experience the passage of time and the space, which is fixed yet continually changing. With a direct gaze, in a continual quest for beauty in real life and ways to express it, she lives and breathes the painting, dwells within it. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out in his text 鈥淓ye and Mind,鈥� 鈥淪eeing is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close up into myself.鈥� [1] Each one of Worke鈥檚 paintings is a marvelous and meticulous arrangement of colors and figures, through which one can touch reality at the fission of Being at a particular point in time and space.
Michal Mamit Worke, winner of the 2020 Lauren & Mitchell Presser Contemporary Art Grant, is a unique presence in the Israeli art scene. Her paintings are characterized by a stylized and controlled figurative style in a bold palette. They engage with scenes and people from everyday life that are depicted in the tradition of figurative painting in general, and realistic painting in particular, and probe its possible boundaries.
Worke addresses the discrepancy between painting as a mode of representation and its nature as an intimate act 鈥� between the painter and her subjects, and between the world presented in the paintings and the viewer and his or her world. Through the act of painting, with all that it entails, she seeks to decipher the gaze as an interchange of power relations that plays out before the viewers鈥� eyes.
Worke observes her immediate surroundings and tries to decipher the sight itself, the essence of the gaze. It is not a passive gaze but an active one, based on continual conscious choice: a choice to see the people, the situations, the interiors of the rooms, and the cityscapes outside; a deliberate choice to use traditional painting methods, and subvert them; a choice to enter into a dialogue with the history of art, amidst a determination to be instantly engaged by what is happening before her eyes. Worke cannot help but paint, cannot help but experience the passage of time and the space, which is fixed yet continually changing. With a direct gaze, in a continual quest for beauty in real life and ways to express it, she lives and breathes the painting, dwells within it. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out in his text 鈥淓ye and Mind,鈥� 鈥淪eeing is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close up into myself.鈥� [1] Each one of Worke鈥檚 paintings is a marvelous and meticulous arrangement of colors and figures, through which one can touch reality at the fission of Being at a particular point in time and space.
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