Michal Na'aman

Michal Na'aman
Photograph of Michal Na'aman, 1978
Born	(1951-11-19) November 19, 1951 (age 65) Kvutzat Kinneret, Israel
Nationality	Israeli
Known for	Conceptual art painter
Movement	Israeli art

Michal Na'aman (born 1951, Kibbutz Kvutzat Kinneret), is an Israeli painter. From the point of view of values, her work is characterized as conceptual art and deals with such subjects as the limitations of language and sight, the possibilities for expression, and gender issues. Using the techniques of collage, Na'aman has created works that examine the visual way of thinking as opposed to the verbal way of thinking. In 2014 she was awarded the Israel Prize for Plastic Arts for her work.

Michal Na'aman was born in 1951, the youngest of the four children of the historian Shlomo Na'aman and of Leah Kupernik. She grew up on Kibbutz Kvutzat Kinneret, where her father was a teacher in the regional high school and her mother in the joint school. In an interview many years later Na'aman noted that her parents' "non-pioneer" careers drew an unenthusiastic response from the kibbutz members. "My family was a little like lepers there," Na'aman testified, "and the fact is they were thrown out." In 1964 she left with her parents to the town of Lod. While she was studying in high school, she also studied at the "Margoshilsky" High School for Art, Tel Aviv. After that she studied art privately with George Shemesh.

In 1969, Na'aman began studying at the "Hamidrasha" Art Teachers' Training College, which at that time was next to the Beit Histadrut Ha-Morim (Teacher's Union House) At Hamidrasha she studied art with Ran Shechori, Dov Feigin, and Raffi Lavie. Lavie's artistic language, which included scribbling and the use collage, and styles such as "Want of Matter", was adopted by Na'aman and by other students of Lavie. However, what distinguished Na'aman's work from Lavie's was that in her works there were textual images, cutting her work off from the separation of "form" and "content" that Lavie insisted on in his work.

In 1972, Na'aman completed her studies in the History of Art and Literature at Tel Aviv University. In this same year she exhibited some of her works in a group exhibition at "Gallery 201" in Tel Aviv.

In 1974, Na'aman exhibited her works in the exhibition "Five Young Artists" in the Kibbutz Art Gallery in Tel Aviv. The other artists who exhibited along with Na'aman were Tamar Getter, David Ginton, Nahum Tevet, and Efrat Natan, who knew each other through their connection to Raffi Lavie. On her work "A Kid in Its Mother's Milk" (1974), which was shown in this exhibition, Na'aman wrote a text that transferred "the religious, Talmudic law to a national, secular reality" in both a private and a national context. The Biblical text "A Kid in Its Mother's Milk" appears on a piece of exercise book paper next to the text "A Country That Eats its Young", as well as in pink letters on the wall of the gallery. The work was heavily criticized during the exhibition. Yehoshua Kenaz, for example, the editor of the Culture Supplement of the newspaper Haaretz at the time, described the work as "trickery".