Yael Ben-Shalom

Yael is born in Jerusalem in 1977 and currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. She studied Fine Art (with honor) at the Beit Berl College (2009) and holds an MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (2014).

In her works, Yael is dealing with the notion of temporariness in painting. She chooses fragile surroundings for a painting to be created in an ongoing process with deliberate and coincidence actions. She aims to create an indirect, physical, intersection between the work and the viewer. She tries to bring the painting into the point where it exists between dimensions (One-two and three dimensions). Her inspiration comes sometimes from the material itself and from materials intersections. Her interest is in the painting as a show of flash and light which is being created from the combination of the movement of the body and the eye of the viewer, the external light and the work itself. Because of its temporary nature, the painting sometimes becomes an echo for the performance of its making.           

She recently started to test the borders between painting and other media such as photography and film as a wide surface to work on. She approaches photography as a research tool with painting as the subject of research. She explores the abilities of photography to get inside the layers of the paintings.

Architecture is a motif for her work, in general. For example, in a site-specific work she enlarged a small painting to the large-scale dimensions of the space, and in this act, abolished the gallery walls. In the series of paintings named "Acoustic Walls", she took a fragment from an acoustic room, turned it into a painting and by that brought its architectural nature to act as the main actor. Still, this architecture is one that seeks for a reflection of eco, and becomes not only an object to look at but an object that looks at you.
She questions how to make a non-artificial connection between actions and products. In her recent works, the action is very intense. The physical is being exiled from the exhibited outcome. This act brings into tension the relationship between the action of doing (notions of time, physical work etc)  and the image.