A BREATH OF AIR

A painting exhibition by the artist Michal Daniel shall be displayed at the NOX gallery of contemporary art at the Jaffa port.
The pieces of the series deal with the artist’s relationship with the presence of water in a person’s breathing experience when resurfacing from underwater.
Figurative oil paintings, pergament paper sketches with cotton washes to intimate memories accompanied with light, nature and feelings of weightlessness and motility.

Since childhood, she has found her inner language and understanding of the world via art. In some of her pieces, she engulfs the pergament paper sketches with a blanket of untamed cotton. For her, the cotton symbolizes a place of both comfort and suffocation, to wrap yourself until the need for air is greater than the comfort, a representation of childhood memories and experiences from Kibbutz Gvat, where she grew up.

The exhibition welcomes the viewer to moments of merging time and memories, direct dive towards our deep connection with our senses beyond the limitations of mind and intellect.

Curator: Limor Margolis

Michal Daniel has been working on the exhibition for the last four years, but her interest and curiosity regarding breathing and the relationship between water and air has been around for years. Questions that try to figure out how to breathe, how to stop breathing and what happens in the transition between water and air, have preoccupied her since childhood. Over the years, she has looked at the experience, focused on sensations, situations, and wondered about moments of breath, the connections between water and air and man, the feeling that compels going out and breathe, to connect again to the sources of life and to the essentials of animals. Michal deals with internal reflection, with images that express feelings, human reflections and changing colors. It is also directed at the resemblance between these experiences and the birth experience, in which the baby emerges from a watery and relaxed environment and begins to breathe in one moment when he enters the world.

The paintings in the exhibition rely mostly on family photographs, as a basis for research and deep observation of herself and the environment, aspects of relationships with water and surrounding circles, the behavior of spaces and differences in interpretations, and from person to person.

Michal used three main techniques in her work: oil on canvas, oil on a waterfall (thick plastic sheet) and pencil drawing on a pergament paper over a bed of cotton. Cotton is not just material for her. It symbolizes a place of tenderness and childhood, freedom and independence alongside a need for air. Michal grew up in Kibbutz Gvat, and has many diverse memories that include connection to the place and water, construction of palaces from cotton grains and spaces, along with suffocation and constant exposure.
Michal Daniel (1968) holds a BA in Social Sciences (Yizreel College), MA in Society and Arts (the College of Society and Arts, Netanya) and Photo Therapy studies (Tel Aviv University), an educator with an emphasis on art, Lecturer and group counsellor in photo therapy, teaching, Social activism , empowerment and personal expression.
In recent years she has studied and painted in the studio of the artist Haya Gertz Ran.