The viewer is overwhelmed by the sense of visual delight present in the colourful works of Eliza Olmert, which are bound by a shared sense of fluidity and dynamism, each with its own heartbeat and signature vibrancy. There is no hierarchy of techniques here, whether it demands precision, an abundance of care, experience and exceptional technical skills, or whether it is ready-made, an object scooped up from a pile at the side of the road.

Olmert’s works are multi-layered: visible and concealed, individual and universal, tangible and metaphorical, all intertwined and echoing local motifs that express a search for belonging alongside a sense of transcience and existential angst. None of these are strangers to Olmert’s internal landscape, as the daughter of immigrants who was born in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany. 

The tension between the real and the imagined is formed by the contrast between deliberate brushstrokes and random spillage and childish doodles. By employing this contrast, she introduces a subjective experience that goes beyond the tangible depiction. The purity of belonging and anti-belonging, of a place and its absence, are woven into a unique individual aesthetic. Her wide-eyed gaze scans her surroundings, and its banality is charged with a thousand meanings. The depictions of beauty are taken not from catalogues of aesthetic consensus, but rather from an intimate meeting of Olmert’s critical eye and the aura of the object as it tells its story.

The works in the exhibition reveal Olmert’s broad circles of identity as an individual and as an artist. Beyond the ambiguity and the absence of a specific time, place or event, her works expose the elaborate constructions of the soul that center the individual – even when the subject of the painting is a cypress tree, a plane or a leak stain. Below the surface of evocative landscape paintings lies a whisper of desire to investigate and experience, tampered by a cautious optimism.

Co-curators: Yona Fischer (RIP)
and Carmit Blumenson