Nouli Omer’s new exhibition, Honey and Venom, presents colorful and densely embroidered works that the artist refers to as “embroiderings” (Tziyurkama), a fusion of embroidery and painting.
These works were created with a fine needle and colorful threads in a wide range of hues, embroidered over many hours onto simple jute surfaces.
In her work, Omer explores everyday scenes and life events through a colorful red-haired figure named Pitangula. This character allows the artist to conduct her investigation in a manner that is at once humorous and tragic, hovering between concrete biographical events and representative scenes drawn from the history of art.
The works reveal a creative impulse to disrupt and refine, to rebel and to listen, to unravel and to embroider the tensions hidden between inner turbulence and external discipline, between pain and despair and joy and fulfillment, between alienation and loneliness and partnership and love.
The scenes that unfold across the vibrant textile surfaces, marked by meticulous craftsmanship, seem to shift between images from the world of play, from which Omer originally emerged. A subtle humor accompanies the works, while criticism and fear simmer beneath the surface and occasionally emerge openly, as demonstrated in the later work Scathing Portrait (2024), which depicts Pitangula as an elderly woman with bluish hair and a deeply lined face, while her dream of flying remains unrealized.
Honey and Venom is an embroidered journey through the depths of the soul, at once turbulent and quiet, provocative and tender.
Curator: Adva Drori
