The exhibition Speculum presents selected works from several series created by Lia Kaufman in recent years. All focus on female figures and explore the tension between identity, silencing, and oppression. In her works, the body becomes a space of living speech, where gestures replace absent words. In oil paintings and drawings, a delicate yet charged arena unfolds, where movement, silence, and protest are interwoven.
The women in Kaufman’s paintings are always alone, drifting between an outward call and inward listening. At times, they surrender to movement in performative, dance-like gestures of taut bodies seeking to protest, to cross boundaries, and to give voice to what has been silenced—as if carving a path between the layers of paint and the walls of the world. At other times, they dwell in intimate moments of quiet, dreaming, and inward gathering, in a soft state of acceptance, bearing upon their bodies the responsibilities, roles, and weight of everyday life.
Kaufman paints from observation of the women in her family, and also paints herself. Each portrait becomes a symbol, a reflection of “every woman.” Her gaze is compassionate yet penetrating, searching for the fleeting moment in which the figure remains exposed, vulnerable, human.
In the background hovers Kaufman’s engagement with religion. In her youth in Bogotá, Colombia, she experienced Judaism as part of everyday life, rather than as a divisive force imposing rigid limitations on the individual. The gap between the Judaism she knew in Colombia and the institutional Judaism of Israel became, for her, a rupture and a source of inner protest. From this emerges the use of the tallit as a subversive symbol—deconstructed and transformed into a tool of performative female protest and rebellion, becoming an object that conceals and reveals, suffocates and liberates.
Across the various expressions of the feminine, painting becomes an act of freedom, of rebellion, and of an inner dialogue with memory and the body. Between meticulous realism and the liberated movement of color, intensely expressive female figures emerge, their presence burning even when their voice is denied. Kaufman invites the viewer to encounter the inner feminine tension between silencing and visibility, between tradition and protest, and between boundary and the act of breaking through it.
Curator: Adi Argov