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Ester Schneider
Acclaimed artist Ester Schneider (b. 1978), whose paintings illustrate this issue of Sources, is a recipient of Israel’s 2019 Ministry of Culture Award in Visual Art. She has exhibited her work at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (which houses her paintings in its permanent collection), Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Eretz Israel Museum, Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem, and Triumph Gallery in Moscow.
The paintings selected for this issue were featured in Blush, Schneider’s solo show at Tel Aviv’s RawArt Gallery. (They were photographed by Youval Hai and appear here courtesy of the artist and RawArt Gallery.) “My work is inspired by multiple cultural discourses,” she says, “from Jewish mysticism and its dialogue with other religions to Persian miniatures, Russian Modernism, and Israeli painting. Combined, they suggest a politics of inclusion, a bringing together of repressed qualities that are normally overlooked. Despite their naive and wild look, these colorful, seductive works are in fact highly structured. By creating disruptions, they invite questions regarding complexities of identity and belief.”
The curator of Blush, Maya Bamberger, writes:
Ester Schneider’s paintings are rich in symbolic systems of bold colors, signs, and figures. These stem from simple and intuitive gestures, which are then woven with layers of references and meaning. A yellow semicircle, which was the origin of the work “Sunbird,” is followed by a figure that turns her head to the source of the light, in an Art Nouveauesque distortion. Yellow drops trickle down, forming a stabilizing spine. The drop shape reappears in the paintings as tears, rain, or blood. The drop also reflects the nature of watercolors, trapped under their surface tension before spreading throughout the canvas, occasionally revealing the bareness beneath.
Ester is presently completing a cycle of paintings inspired by her father, renowned scholar of ancient Jewish mysticism Michael “Misha” Schneider, who taught at Bar-Ilan University until his untimely death last year.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021
