artist/ Ziv

Israël

Orli Ziv was born in 1960, not far from Paris. In 1978, her love of art leads her to Claude Roederer’s (1924-1988) academy, place des Vosges, Paris. With this artist, close to the surrealist movement, she discovers the intimate link between symbolism and abstract art.
She started evolving around the Parisian art scene in the mid-1980s. From this period, her interest in artistic multidisciplinarity and her taste for improvisation and experimentation remain. However, she returns to her first love when, after her installation in Jerusalem in 1990, she devotes herself to painting. At a time when street art and pop art were raging, Ziv decided to do the opposite and to pick up the oil, the pigments and the palette knife that would never leave her afterwards. Going against the “speed culture”, she embraces the slow temporality of her favorite media.

Ziv explores the artistic path of pictorialism before playing more and more with raw matter. Layer after layer, painting after painting, she moves away from her beginnings in favor of an increasingly abstract expressionism. Nowadays
Orli Ziv’s art oscillates between pictorialism and raw abstraction. Her precise linework technique and her vigorous and spontaneous palette knife work blend to shape the score of a euphoric yet peaceful dance. Marked by a deep reflection on the value of gesture, her artwork is characterized by its light, its movement, and its lyricism. Her vibrant color palette favors texture over motifs. Using pigments, oil, gold or silver leaves applied with a palette knife, Ziv unfolds a shimmering universe suspended between heaven and earth on her canvases.

Between 1997 and 2019, the artist exhibited in Israel, France, Canada, and the United States, before hiding in her studio, at the gates of the desert, to investigate the lightness of freedom, the color of gesture and the ascent of her art. She breaks out of her box and pushes the limits of painting on increasingly larger canvases. From this new phase was born the series «Jerusalem Obsession». The latter was presented at the eponymous exhibition Avenue Montaigne in Paris in October 2022 during Basel Paris+ and in June 23, for a solo show of 2 months in the mythic rue de Seine at Paris St Germain des Prés. The Ava Kleijman Gallery is the exclusive representative of Orli Ziv.