Digital Exhibition Catalogue

Boundaries

Elie Shamir

Venue

Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod

Location

Ein Harod, Israel

Dates

June 15, 2020 – January 1, 2021

Works

9 works

About the Artist ↓

Elie Shamir is a painter whose work encompasses portraiture, landscape, and figurative painting, deeply rooted in the agricultural life and cultural identity of the Jezreel Valley. A graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem (BFA, 1981; MA, 1996), Shamir explores themes of place, memory, family, and identity through paintings inspired by his birthplace and its pioneering history. Recurring subjects include members of his own family and the landscapes of Kfar Yehoshua, creating a personal narrative that reflects broader aspects of Israeli society. Shamir has exhibited extensively in Israel and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and Zemack Contemporary Art, as well as presentations at the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Vittoriano Museum, Rome, and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. He lives and works in Kfar Yehoshua.

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Exhibition Statement

Borders brings together landscape paintings by Eli Shamir that examine the relationship between landscape, territory, and the act of looking. Depicting views across the Jezreel Valley and toward neighboring regions, the works consider boundaries not simply as geographical divisions, but as constructs shaped by viewpoint, history, memory, and representation. Rather than presenting the landscape as an all-encompassing panorama, Shamir builds his paintings through partial and interwoven viewpoints. Familiar places become sites through which questions of belonging, political territory, and the history of Israeli landscape painting are explored. The exhibition considers the boundary between observer and landscape, self and other, and lived place and its representation.

Publications & Documents

Scholarly Essay