Aviv Benn at RawArt Gallery

Artist: Aviv Benn

Exhibition title: Ashglory

Venue: RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel

Date: July 25 – September 7, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv

RawArt Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Aviv Benn’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, titled Ashglory. Using expressive, immediate and comical painting language, Benn captures her feelings and reactions towards life in our current era – an age of anxiety, fear and uncertainty. Professor Lisa Wainwright (Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), writes in the exhibition catalog:

“Our children are having nightmares. Unsettled by the frenetic and uncertain state of the world, fiendish creatures populate subconscious dreaming. And so it is for the painter, Aviv Benn who captures such chilling visions in her new body of work, titled Ashglory, after poet Paul Celan’s haunting words. Here we find ghostly, amorphous figures – some frightening, some not, wide-eyed, staring in awe of what lies before them. Tragic yet beautiful, their oversized hands making gestures that slip between warning and welcome, fear and desire. And all float within ornamental fields of paint splendidly embellished with patterns and motifs that ooze onto and through their gossamer skins. Benn’s boldly colored characters catch our gaze and we stare back in alliance with their states of shock and astonishment. We share in this peculiar place of existential unknowing that Benn so brilliantly conjures through her painted images of sympathetic monstrous beings.”

Aviv Benn (b. 1988 in Tel-Aviv), lives and works in Chicago IL. She completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and completed her BFA at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem in 2013. Benn had solo exhibitions at Art Von Frei Gallery, Berlin in 2016, RawArt Gallery, Tel Aviv in 2017 and Devening Projects Gallery, Chicago in 2018. She participated in various group exhibitions in Germany, Chicago, New York and Tel-Aviv. She received the Rabinovich Foundation Grant in 2015 and 2019 and the Graduate Dean Professional Development Award from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 and 2018.