Ora Brill

Ora Brill: Between Light and Darkness

Curator: Ilan Wizgan

Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv

 13.11.2025-27.12.2025

In recent years, Ora Brill’s artistic journey has unfolded along two parallel paths: one figurative, echoing the early stages of her career, and the other abstract or semi-abstract, which has defined much of her work over the past two decades. This exhibition centers on the latter, presenting key series created before and after the October 7 massacre.
Two elemental forces — water and light — anchor Brill’s visual and philosophical inquiry. Both are rendered in her work as insufficient, elusive. The light is dim, indirect, filtered like moonlight. The water spills, leaks, flows — always in motion, never contained. These motifs evoke a rich tapestry of metaphors, yet for Brill, they most intimately reflect the soul and the emotional realm. Her canvases pulse with tension: between containment and overflow, between structure and dissolution. In Jungian terms, they articulate a dialogue between the conscious and the subconscious.
The moon, too, carries layered symbolism — cultural, spiritual, and physical. It governs tides, inspires myths, and in Brill’s work, it becomes both subject and symbol. Often paired with water, the moon appears as a recurring image, its form and meaning shifting across compositions. The circle — a central shape in Brill’s visual lexicon — may signify a well in one painting, a moon in another. In her most recent works, the moon emerges as protagonist: a supermoon, vast and golden, its light cascading like liquid, echoing the motion of water.
The past two years have brought profound personal and collective upheaval. Brill has contended with serious illness within her home, while also bearing witness to national trauma — the massacre of October 7 and the ongoing anguish of the hostages and their families. The works in this exhibition arise from a complex and expansive creative process, spanning mediums, dimensions, and scales. Familiar motifs — pomegranate seeds, archetypal houses, precarious structures — are joined by new ones: lunar phases and eclipses, stones, perforated buildings, prayer-like beads, and garments such as tank tops and undershirts. These images often emerge from dark backgrounds — earthy browns, midnight blues — punctuated by vivid reds and blues.
The bright red and the intimate garments first appeared in a poignant series titled The Anemone’s Blood and the Stain of the Crocus, created in memory of a young woman from Brill’s village who was murdered at the Nova party. Those small paintings were raw, immediate expressions of grief. In contrast, the large-scale works in this exhibition reflect a deeper internalization — a contemplative attempt to process and understand the rupture. The imagery is more symbolic, the colors more contained, each painting a fragile architecture of meaning, holding together elements that threaten to drift apart.
Among the new symbols is the tank top — explored in both painting and sculpture (not shown here). These works evoke Efrat Nathan’s iconic tank tops from the 2000s, inverted and perforated. Brill’s use of mesh gauze recalls Nathan’s window screens, yet their references diverge. Nathan’s garments spoke of kibbutz life — gray for labor, white for rest. Brill’s tank tops arise from the hospital setting, embodying a meditation on illness and healing, both physical and emotional.
Another striking image is that of the stone — as weight, as obstacle, as marker. Stones roll, protect, preserve; they seal wells and tombs alike. In Brill’s compositions, stones mingle with liquid gold and red sap-like fluids, conjuring the myth of the philosopher’s stone — the alchemical substance believed to transmute base metals into gold, to heal, and to grant immortality. Described in ancient texts as a red powder or fluid, the philosopher’s stone becomes a metaphor for transformation, elevation, and redemption. These themes — the potential for change, the yearning to turn suffering into light — resonate deeply in Brill’s life and art.