Shedding

Osnat Oliva is a painter whose practice developed from a background in visual communication and graphic design. She later studied painting for six years at Israel Hershberg’s Jerusalem Studio School and participated in five summer landscape programs in Italy with visiting artists. Her early paintings and drawings were grounded primarily in direct observation, developing a visual language based on tonal relationships, line, form and edges. In her more recent work, Oliva moves beyond straightforward representation, combining multiple observed motifs into complex compositions that explore abstraction, movement and richly worked surfaces. Drawing on forms found in nature, her practice explores the relationship between observation and invention, creating pictorial spaces that move between the recognizable and the imagined.