And Then Came the Waters
Brit Einstein and Maia Shiran – Duo Exhibition
Curator: Lior Schur
29.5.2025 - 5.7.2025
Brit Einstein and Maia Shiran’s duo exhibition And Then Came the Waters is the opening show of Alfred Gallery’s new exhibition season "How to get through it?". In a bleak political and emotional climate, the exhibition "And Then Came the Waters" engages with the season’s theme but does not pursue a way out or the illusion of a solution. On the contrary—it aims to burrow into the cracks, into the earth, in the belief that precisely there, in uncertainty, lies the potential for change.
At the heart of the exhibition are water and earth, elements that consistently recur in Brit Einstein and Maia Shiran’s art. Their diverse use of natural materials—soil, crushed stone, sand, and water—serves as a means to generate movement, form, seepage, erasure, disappearance, and passive motion.
In their exhibition the artists join in an intense, intimate, and material dialogue, responding not only to external reality but also to underlying currents of internal transformation. Most of the works were created specifically for the exhibition. Together, Einstein and Shiran have created an exhibition that is a space both for contemplation and for emotional participation. Theirs is an ongoing quest for movement emerging from rupture, for life within a fractured yet fertile land.
Forgiveness
Brit Einstein seeks to return to the earth, to rediscover the elements, to send out roots. The body of work she presents in the exhibition is titled "Forgiveness", a word that in Hebrew can also be read as a burrow or tunnel. The elements comprising Einstein’s work pertain to a moment hovering between culmination – death and beginning – genesis.
Einstein, born and raised in Kibbutz Magen, is an artist who attentively listens to her surroundings. She works with large clods of loess soil, brought from the kibbutz which is located close to the Gaza border. The clods are surprisingly strong and massive, yet at the same time they are brittle and crumble. Through her work, she experiences firsthand the principle of "communicating vessels": as she travels south to Magen to work with soil saturated with meaning, she inevitably finds herself reabsorbing the sounds of war. Her urge to disengage proves again and again to be unattainable, as everything remains interconnected within the earth of this place.
The artist references the act of plowing, the initial process of preparing soil for sowing, that requires immense power and massive blades. A miniature video work is embedded inside a large clod of soil, like a delicate seed nested deep in the dark, mysterious earth. The moment revealed through the small crevice was filmed at night, in a stream flowing down the Besor wadi. It is the testament of a private moment the artist experienced in pure nature, near her home, in the war-torn countryside to which she returns. Nocturnal excursions to the wadi require courage in order to confront both fear and memories. The moon is full; frogs croak in the background—it is a scene brimming with beauty and verve. Yet the video also testifies to the unbearable and unending war, precisely through what remains unseen. The war, orchestrated by humans (in contrast to nature), unfolds in the background at full magnitude as fighter jets tear across the sky.
On the upper gallery windows, the artist creates a cascade of water that evokes endless weeping, only its reflections managing to penetrate into the protected space below. The flow of water outside lingers on the verge between miraculous summer rains and the threat of deluge and flooding. In another video work, the flicker of water against the window morphs into a surge enveloping the figure of a naked, motionless woman.
Permeation
Maya Shiran’s large-scale paintings are born from her daily ritual of observing the garden surrounding her home. While remaining loyal to the physical layout of the space, she employs it as substructure rather than subject: Where does the diagonal of the tree branch fall? Where does the fence begin? Within these boundaries, she allows materials and colors take their course. Thus she establishes constraints and commits to them—precisely because of the abstract nature of her painting, characterized by fluid and diffusive qualities.
Shiran’s paintings stem from material research and are based on reactions between substances that interact—some dissolve and liquify, some solidify, and some resist each another. Shiran crushes stones and blends the granules into the pigment. She pours water and waits for it to absorb and evaporate, or examines how corrosion forms when metallic pigment meets liquid. Her works vary from dense, tactile regions to delicate, fleeting strokes, as she blends the elements of earth and water in layers into her paintings.
Time Touches the Earth
Although the paintings are abstract and have moved away from their domestic origins, one senses that Shiran’s works create an expanse that is both familiar and unknown—abandoned or perhaps never inhabited. She introduces disruptions within the dissolving landscapes and dreamlike imagery, so that warm stains emerge alongside coolness, recalling tree resin or wounds seeping rust. Shiran explores how the dimensions of time and space intersect and what portals are revealed in the transition between them. Shiran deals with disintegration; whenever harmony is manifested she disturbs it, making the conflict visible. The horror of the current era is evident in her work, in the urgency of the painting process. And yet she seeks to find a crevice—a place to dwell, to be, and to grow.
Both artists explore the boundary between restraint and relinquishing control, creating a delicate interplay between structure and unraveling. The two elements in their works encompass dual potential: water quenches, moves, and breathes life, yet it can also drown. Growth emerges from soil, but the earth is also where things are buried. Biding time is a significant part of the process for each of the artists who must wait for water to fully permeate, test the resilience of stone against the forces acting upon it, and be attentive to what insists on surging up from the depths.
Einstein and Shiran move between inner and outer realities. They establish a barrier between these two realms to check the flood of emotions in what in any case feels like a lack of solid ground. While Einstein goes to Magen to physically reconnect with the soil and embrace it, Shiran’s anchor is embedded in observation of her immediate home surroundings, and of what emerges on her canvases. For both, artistic creation compels movement, insisting on action as a form of resistance against paralyzing trauma.
About the artists and the curator:
Brit Einstein (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist from Kibbutz Magen. She is a graduate of the new research department at the School of Visual Theater and studied drawing and painting with artist Maya Cohen Levy. Her works have been exhibited in various galleries in Israel, including Beeri, Sapir College, Beit Benyamini, the Performance Conference at the School of Visual Theater, Shemi Atelier, Nolobaz, as well as abroad, at 2884 km bis Bat Galim (Berlin), and Art Up Nation (New York).
Maia Shiran (b. 1980) was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Brazil and Uruguay. She learned calligraphy and Japanese embroidery, and studied painting at "Hatahana Studio" and "HaKolel" in Tel Aviv. Her oil paintings incorporate diverse textures, crushed stone and sand, alongside drawing. She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Haifa University (2024) and is the recipient of a purchase award from the Christa and Nikolaus Schües Art Foundation. A member of the Alfred Cooperative Art Institute from 2024.
Lior Schur is a visual artist and a member and curator at the Alfred Cooperative Art Institute (since 2013). She holds a B.ed in Art and Education from the excellence program at HaMidrasha Faculty of Arts, Beit Berel (2008) and is a certified Art Therapist (MA) from Lesley University (2014). Co-founder of the "Art Animals" project: Art viewing courses that combine visual and verbal texts.