KHEN SHISH

On large canvases, using body gestures, her hands, her fingers, a brush, or painting straight from the tube, artist Khen Shish presents an overflowing, multilayered, spectacular, and insatiable painting. Like a chameleon, she moves between expressive, physical, sensual, stormy painting, and painting that is meditative, conceptual, drawing-like, reductive. In the current exhibition, the black-white-pink-gold color range, quintessentially identified with Shish, opens up and expands into a revved up painterly spectacle.

With three decades of painting behind her, color seems to come to her at its own will as the palette opens up. Concurrently, she continues to establish a distinctive visual lexicon, which has become her painterly signature, the Shish language.

Giant vases, bearing painterly scenes, may be construed as monologues, fragments from the artist's private mythology. Connected upturned boats that also resemble eyes, a crying swan, a black foal, a stoned owl, an alley cat with red lipstick, and a tree-lion with brown, spotted eyes, are some of the images invited to Shish's spectacle.

The exhibition raises fundamental questions about the nature of painting. What is the source of its power? What is its language? What breeze blows in the space between the painting, the painter, and the viewer? Between the abstract and the concrete, poetic, and expressive? Shish is like a guest in her own painting. At times she is a sun, at others—a single, solitary star.

The interior walls of the gallery were painted Middle Eastern blue up to eye level—a kind of water line, with the works hanging above or below it in a changing rhythm. The image was usually in the center of the sheet of paper, as in talisman cards, and accompanied by various letter combinations, black and red energy lines, golden glows and various symbols. To this Shish added sage leaves or myrtle branches, and occasionally an exotic bird or insect, bits of their bodies glimpsed through the layers of paint that cover the sheets, with empty, bodyless eyes gazing out. All these were suggestive of a frenzy, a storm, something indecipherable and secret. In the lower gallery, as in an archaeological museum, paintings were hung upon heavy, ancient stone walls in prayer-like niches. Small works—figurines, talismans, alphabetic characters, threads, masks and more—were displayed in transparent glass cases. The works surrounded the viewers from all sides, as though they had been thrown into a cultic arena of ancient spiritual rituals.

On the upper level, a chameleon of acrylic paint and gold leaf stretched on a sheet of paper 4.5 meters wide. Large squares cut in its belly revealed its innards as a poetic X-ray—a huge and miraculous collage work nestled in a dark and transparent magic mountain.

For her second collaboration with Loushy Art & Projects, Khen Shish painted on six screens. Unlike decorative screen painting, Shish created a “painterly sentence” that turned the surface into a double-sided object. It steered viewers toward looking for the rest of the fantasy depicted on one side of the object, enticing them to switch to the other side—like turning a page in a book. Each screen is a triptych, a common format in Christian religious paintings and other magical objects. On the screens, Shish set out her characteristic repository of images, drawn from her family origins and from Jewish tradition, through which she tells her story.

The exhibition featured monoprints, etchings created by the artist over fifteen years of work at the Gottesman Etching Center, as well as a large painting on canvas with her characteristic motifs of eyes, tears, leaves, and fire. The works highlight the tension between the instinctive, physical, liberated painterly gesture and the symbolic form that relates to image, construction, story.

Throughout her years of work as a painter Shish has developed a repository of personal images that have become identified with her. This personal imagery also hase an archetypal aspect: the flowing tears symbolize profound pain and sorrow, and are depicted in various mythologies as precious stones, as rain, or as restorative rays of sunlight. Legend has it that all of humanity was born from God’s tears. The bird marks the link between heaven and earth, between conscious and unconscious. It embodies the anima of the world, its hidden soul. At the same time, Shish’s paintings have aspects of action painting, which in her eyes represents an act of giving, of generosity—a broad-hearted gesture from the body to the world.

“When the sun vanishes, the artists rise to their feet. It is a special time, a time of “Bread and Work” during the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone is in lockdown and the country is beset by a wave of mass demonstrations. A million people are unemployed, and people have manned the barricades. At this time, I willingly accepted Tova Osman’s invitation to exhibit with Thomas Kroner—a genius but forgotten artist whom I did not get to learn about at art school. Kroner produces flame-like scribbles like a perilous voodoo dance, with touches of gold and pen, on notebook pages filled with a chaotic dance and flung into life with intensity, anxiety and pain. The characters are tormented, afraid to meet the viewer’s eyes. With a roller-coaster life story—from Judaism to Christianity—the crosses that Kroner produces on paper are like an unknown path of truth and emotion. All of these seemed to me apposite apostle for this moment in time. Thank you Thomas, it was good to meet you.”
— Khen Shish

A large black patch extends across the middle of the sheet of paper. It is not an ink patch, but one of acrylic, its margins haphazard and imprecise, yet symmetrical—a kind of Rorschach mirror image of itself. This is the core image in Khen’s series Deliberately Random (2018–19). The early works in the series are based on the random nature of the form, and to this she adds small touches in gold, highlighting the image that emerged before her eyes when she saw the patch: she accentuates the image, lightening it with touches of gold, of colored ink, or the addition of black paint, no longer relying on the natural form created when spilled or smeared paint on the sheet paper that had been folded in half. The works explore the middle ground between accidental and premeditated—“a successful accident,” as she calls it. As the series progresses, so too does her control of the placement of the pigment on the page, and the accidental nature of the image is diminished. The themes are familiar from Shish’s work over the years, as are the black and gold, but she relies on the past to move forward. The shape of the leaf in the myrtle branches in the new works is redolent of eyes or tears, which often featured in her past work, but here the physical object—the branch itself—is added to the work. The green leaf emits a breath of life, momentary and transient, in the static work: the fresh green fades, and the leaf dries out and becomes brittle.

This is a series of eight objects created in a collaboration between Khen Shish and Loushy Art & Projects. Each is a wooden box hanging on the wall, bearing a painted image: when one pulls its wooden lid down and opens it, one discovers another image—the upper half of which is painted in glass paints on a mirror inside the box, and the lower half on the inside of the downward dangling open lid. Shish offers the opening and closing object as a layered means of vision. She beckons viewers to break through naïve popular-culture images (hearts, leaves, faces) and through the red color and gold leaf—only to present them with their own reflection as seen through the image within. In this way, she induces the viewer to observe their own self through the attributes of the artistic object.

Political changes in the Western world drove many democratic countries to a constant "state of emergency", which lead to an erosion of citizens' and institutions' rights. The new cluster of exhibitions revolves around artists' response to limitations placed on civil freedom, in Israel and worldwide. The various exhibitions relate to social issues such as the right of protest, women rights, rights of the LGBTQIA community, and the rights of refugees. Many artist use artistic activism as a strategy, and raise the question whether contemporary art has the power to function as an arena of political protest. This in contrast to the common view, according to which the revolutionary spirit is over and every form of criticism domed to undergo castrating censorship.

Six huge, individual brides, projecting female power, welcomed the viewer at the entrance to the exhibition at the Gordon Gallery in Tel Aviv, each a cross of human and animal. Khen Shish’s Tunisian Bride—like the one in Nissim Aloni’s renowned play, The Bride and the Butterfly Catcher —joins an ancient order of archetypal brides who fled from their canopies in a flutter of the bridal veil. She is a deceptive creature: flooded in a sea of tears, engulfed in flames like a martyr, but at the same time growing to monumental proportions, bedecked as a Byzantine queen and sprouting scorpion-like pincers or peacock wings—a bride-bird of prey, pecking at her groom’s liver. The pink space in the paintings, saccharine-sweet and full of hearts, is crammed with a flock of sharp-beaked eagles and a shower of black tears. The presence of the tears, made of thick cardboard and glued to the painted fabric, is very palpable.

In the corner were two small collages: Gorky and His Family and Rothko and My Tunisian Family, which combine photos related to the artists Gorky and Rothko—representing the pinnacles of modernism in Western art—with pictures from the photo album of the artist’s Tunisian family.

The exhibition I Didn’t Have The Heart To Wake You consists entirely of paintings—large diptychs, triptychs, and pentaptych. It is all-encompassing, biographical painting engaged with magic and spirituality. The titles—such as Heart Turning to Coal Because of You, or I Got Up in the Morning and Left—add to the sense of a heaving moment flowing directly from the heart onto the canvas. It is process painting that highlights painterly gestures such as dripping and etching, brushstrokes placed on the canvas with physical force coupled with subtle touches. Recurring images—eyes, hearts, and birds—and the colors of gold, pink, black, and white, are prominent in these works. Although all the images are personal, they bear an archetypal aspect that lies deep in the collective consciousness. The motif of the eye has traditionally been associated with light, understanding, and spiritual consciousness, or alternatively represents nocturnal vision, the darkness of dreams, and the unknown. The tears course through the paintings with pain and sorrow, but they are also precious stones, rain, and restorative rays of sunlight.

In the Black Distance—a joint, large-scale intergenerational exhibition of works by Lea Nikel and Khen Shish, curated by Naomi Aviv—presents works whose main theme is the color black. It was held on all four floors of the Ashdod Art Museum. At the entrance to the museum, Shish’s sheets of paper covered entire walls, enveloping the viewers and threatening them at the same time with mythological images, such as ravens or highlighted gold crowns, on large and dramatic surfaces. Another gallery featured small works in gold leaf on tracing paper that connected the viewer to spiritual worlds. The exhibition explored the proximity or distance between two aesthetic approaches and painterly values: between Nikel’s ivory, Dionysian black and the coal-like, searing, elemental and romantic black in Shish’s practically monochromatic art; between Nikel’s modernist gesture and Shish’s postmodernist one, flowing between free ensembles of abstraction and representation, reduction and symbolism, elementary-existentialist scratches and poetry.

Khen Shish cuts the gallery space with large scale painting, a partition made of nylon and paper, in an installation consisting of plates, collages and TV work.
Shish’s familiar symbolism, a poetical dictionary of painting-drawing constantly attempting to shield exposed nerves, to consolidate something ceaselessly gnawing from within, in a highly detailed repertoire that makes up a private universe.
The painted eye is turned over, becoming a boat, in an architecture of teardrops and masking tape.
Shish creats a “black religiosity”, a register of world-profaning acts: blackening, lowering, and uglification. The carriers of sanctity of the “decent”, “bourgeois” world are crushed with a brutal aesthetics: the body and the face, the decorative porcelain plates, and of course, the painting. With “piercing” aesthetics, Shish presents agitated performances of the “Theatre of Cruelty” Her face is mutilated, her eyes are gouged out; her body become skeletal, the plates are painted black, the boats sink, nooses dangle about, and only wings are left on the angels. The angel emblem is intertwined with the various work in a visual praxis.
Shish present “an uncanny, overwhelming typology of the power of horror”. These powers have been set free to wreak chaos in the world, to collide with and crash into “normative” material culture. Shish seeks redemption through “destruction”.
The position of the dissident subject generated by Shish formulates an eternal, permanent unraveling of the world. The overt cover offered by the exhibition is but a part of a mutilated objecthood, introduced to be charged with a range of new meanings. Thus the exhibition becomes a peek into a segment extracted from a whole universe, from an infinite lexicon.

In this exhibition, Shish conjured up a private universe through the use of many items. She “split” the gallery space in half with a partition made of construction planks of wood, an inverted desk (Boat), and cardboard boxes spread out in the middle of the space. The eye in the painting turned into a boat—a theme that repeated both in the painting I Am A Sinking Boat and in the sculpture simulating a boat that has run aground on the gallery floor, tied with a rope to a table; the antenna from the painting Irritated Self-Portrait With Antenna jutted out of a six-pack of mineral water bottles; and the portraits became a sculptural figure made of onions, newsprint, and empty bottles, in an architecture of tears and masking-tape.

It is a display of “black religiosity,” a range of acts of desecration: blackening and lowering. The conductors of sanctity of the “proper” world are crushed with brutal aesthetics, in displays of Theater of Cruelty: the face is mutilated, the eyes torn out, the body is skeletal, plates are painted black, the boats are sinking, hanging ropes flutter, and of angels only wings remain.

Khen Shish’s painting The Maiden and the Crow (2007) is an operatic eventthat pulls a curtain back to reveal a grand, surreal dream scene, seeking toformulate the concepts of landscape, soul, and painting in a manner thattranscends the here-and-now. Through its panoramic quality, the tensionbetween the free physical painterly gesture and the symbolic form is unfolded.

Shish captures the array of shapes within a moonstruck nocturnalscene, where thick black brushstrokes generate an intense night sky. Theblackness of the dark, of the abject, of the unknown, fills the canvas,contrasted with brushstrokes of gold and white, and the separation betweenthe different sections is akin to the painting’s subconscious.

The images are personal, yet they carry an archetypal dimension. Amonumental painting, 5.5 meters high and 7 meterswide, it extends from thewall to the floor. Shish embraced the opportunity to work on a very largescale, creating a painting that concurrently envelops and intimidates theviewer. She depicts the face of a black figure, either pecked or kissed by araven—an image that may be associated with countless myths.

Differently-sized eyes hover like living entities around the head, theirwhites are gilded, and the pupils are black. An X is drawn in gold on the face,ostensibly erasing or gagging a non-existent mouth, and the body below thehead is devoid of details and without organs and appendages; like a mass,into which a body was melted. The work conveys a sense of watching the crescendo moment of a struggle that we have not witnessed.

Nuances, such as the occasional use of blue under the black, orattaching gray photo paper, cut like small feathers, give rise to a work that is aclosed statement.

A powerful panoramic painting of a mighty bamboo forest welcomed visitors to the gallery. Shish’s attitude toward art is entirely romantic: it is a belief in the power of a single line to produce a meaningful statement, in the power of the visceral directness of finger-painting, in the drama that takes place on the canvas, in the excitement of attaching cardboard to photography, in touching the most delicate materials of art and the soul. The expressiveness and great urgency of the paintings convey the sense that each sheet of paper, every line, is autobiographical.

In the corner of the gallery, on a high stand, stood an old television set with a portrait of Shish, on which she drew with a black marker. In the headphones, she sang a love song. The drawing, the TV piece and the cardboard objects distributed around the gallery all seek to distill the artistic experience, to break it down to its most basic and essential components and throw away what is redundant.

Beneath the pink veneer of three enormous works are old layers of remnants of images from the artist’s painterly history. The images crop up repeatedly with violent obstinacy, like gray scratches from the past. A series of small paper works (of pencil and gray acrylic with gold leaf) likewise features a rhythmic spectrum from anxiety to euphoria, from line sensitivities to obsessive smearing of monochromatic paint. The title of the exhibition—La vie en rose (Life in Pink)—is a reference to the passion and false promise in Edith Piaf’s pathos-saturated voice in the song of the same name, which in reality is about a turbulent life. The exhibition mainly reflected Shish’s personal world at the time—her sense of alienation and cold in a studio situated in East Berlin on a graffiti-covered street, with an old fireplace with black coal cubes.

The exhibition Birthday opened on the artist’s birthday. In this exhibition, Shish—who has dealt extensively with issues of Middle Eastern, personal and universal identity—chose to place her personal biography within the genealogy of the Israeli art field, as an imaginary family biography.

In the entrance space, a huge painting—acrylic on canvas, pink and black—was hung with a
repeating image of black eyes, some surrounded by a crown, some illuminated by the sun. Brushstrokes of rich pink imbued the work with sensuality. The second room was plastered from floor to ceiling with small sheets of paper—drawings akin to single line scratches; a line that is a flower, eyes, hearts, sun, wide-open eyes, spread-out black hearts, stems, petals and flowers, and eyes once again. A quick, seemingly sloppy line drawing, a personal and unique hand characterized by obsession and intensity. The third room featured large sheets of paper and fabrics with similar lines depicting similar flowers and eyes—but this time in the form of a single, framed work of art.

At the entrance to the exhibition Part-Time Witch, Shish hung clusters of salt fingers from the ceiling, like udders or bunches of phalluses wrapped in plastic. In the great hall stood a massive, elongated object, covered in bright tiles and smeared with delicately textured Vaseline, akin to encrustations of coarse salt. The object—hung like a kitchen cabinet, like a ritual Jewish cleansing bath, or as an immaculately cleaning station of an abandoned factory—overwhelmed the viewer with its disturbing presence. In the passage to the adjoining hall, the viewer’s face was touched by the hands of salt reaching down from above. In that hall were two roughly human-sized aluminum tanks, like two large creatures, or totems: man and woman, father and mother, male and female. Water flowed in a closed circuit between the tanks, its surging echoing throughout the hall and beyond. The input flow of water was equal in strength to the output, or the tanks would have overflowed. On the left, in the corner, on the floor, obscure and sealed numbers flashed discreetly in red-neon light, like whispering coals, their light slightly dimmed by a veil of mesh cloth. Appended to the installation was the poem Braiding the Plaits of Her Hair, from the Tunisian island of Djerba, about a woman of European beauty, who has many suitors. Shish’s artistic language links together opposite poles: a universal artistic discourse and a distillation of her childhood experience in a mystical-religious home.

Khen Shish’s first exhibition was held in the Academic Gallery at the Oranim Art Institute, while still a second-year student there. It featured an installation of a kosher slaughter room that reflected her experience growing up in a religious-mystical home. The materials of the installation were concrete, wood, porcelain, tin, stainless steel, huge slabs and vats, water, coarse salt, grease, and feathers. It appeared as though blood from the ritual Jewish slaughter was flowing through the stainless steel channels, the feathers filled the room, and one could imagine that newly slaughtered meat lay on the wooden boards and salt—a fundamental question seeking an answer in the blood of slaughter, in the absorbent salt, in the cooking vats, in the incessant stream of water, in the relentless process.
On the gallery wall, the artist wrote, “This is not the place of slaughter (I would like to be a kosher butcher). Nor is it my home. The materials here constitute a meeting point. The authentic materials were my starting point, and came in contact with the other things. ... I wanted exorbitant visuality, presence, something that one feels, rather than measures a philosophical manner. I wanted to put meat on the wooden boards, but then took it off. Actually, we are the meat.”