ZIVA JELIN: NIGHT IN BE’ERI
LÉVY GORVY DAYAN is pleased to present Night in Be’eri, Ziva Jelin’s first exhibition with the gallery.
September 25 – November 01, 2025
New York—On September 25, 2025, Lévy Gorvy Dayan will open Ziva Jelin, debuting new paintings by the artist on the gallery’s fifth floor. Across her oeuvre, Ziva Jelin portrays her immediate environment through a lens of intimate experience and memory. Conveying personally resonant images, her landscapes and domestic scenes depict her lifelong home and surroundings in Be’eri, Israel—including pastoral vistas of neighboring buildings, trees and flora, streetlamps, and winding lanes. Jelin’s figuration is attended by abstract pours and cascades of thinned, aqueous paint—bringing together indeterminacy and chance, and gravity and time, with her representations of place.
To create the most recent works in her series Night in Be’eri, Jelin worked in her darkened studio, harnessing photography to project images onto canvas. She utilizes archival, familial, and personal snapshots, captured during walks around her neighborhood, to render her compositions. Draftsmanship too figures prominently in her process, revealing naturalistic scenes whose realism exists in shared harmony and tension with her drips and washes of pigment. For example, in Clouds (2025), Jelin presents a familiar vantage of treetops, her photographic framing suggested through the immediacy of her asymmetrical composition. Composed of semitransparent paint, her dense clouds appear low in the sky, streaked with lines of falling pigment that are at once conceptual and referential to rain.
Jelin has long worked in a restricted palette in order to focus her diaristic scenes. Her recent canvases notably reveal the artist using cool tones of blue and purple—a distinctive shift from her earlier palette in which hues of red and black were predominant. Jelin has poetically described this color scheme as representing her feelings of solitude, reflection, and the void following the attack on Be’eri on October 7, 2023—as well as symbolizing dusk and night. Streetlamps and artificial lighting are central to Jelin’s Ziva Jelin. Clouds, 2025 Wall paint and acrylic on canvas, 49 × 78¾ inches (124.5 × 200 cm) Ziva Jelin. Streetlamp, 2025 Wall paint and acrylic on canvas, 51 × 78¾ inches (129.5 × 200 cm) nocturnal tableaux, illustrated by her austere white backgrounds, such as in Streetlamp (2025). Here, tall trees stand amidst a thicket of vegetation and a walking path, starkly illuminated by two bright lamps. The pronounced tonal contrasts between blue, purple, and white are accented and tempered by a sheer wide sweep of light fuchsia, lending an element of surreality to the landscape. Taken together, the new body of work on view demonstrates Jelin’s distinctive portrayals of place and home, as well as her melding of painting and photography—through which she explores memory, time, identity, and belonging.