DALIA SHAMAY

Artwork by this artist ranges between £500 - £4,500. Please contact the artist directly, or Artist Talk for more information.

Dalia Shamay is an artist, creator and designer. Born in Israel in 1971. She studied graphic design, photography, and product design at the Neri Bloomfield Academy of Design. Her paintings deal with personal, mental content, dealing with loss and pain. Through the paintings, she cries out her difficulties and those of society as a whole. She deals a lot with questions of religion, faith, sexuality, gender, childhood and a lot of imagination. Drawing has always been her only way of expressing the pain she felt. Dalia’s paintings are colorful, cheerful and full of humor, in complete contrast to the difficult content, which enhances the viewer’s experience. Dalia starts drawing with a pencil on the paper and then continues to process her drawings on the iPad. The human body and face fascinate her, her characters are often androgynous, without hair and without clothes, as a reflection of the soul. Dalia uses the drawing of internal body parts, many signs and symbols to show the Human materiality versus the spirit.

For her, the letters symbolize part of the establishment and the government that she criticizes. For example: the letter O is sometimes used as a halo above the characters and sometimes as something that binds, strangles, connects. The letter V as a symbol of victory. The letter D belongs to her first name. the letter Y when it is upside down; as an unstable and branched base. The sign € - Euro, a symbol of capital, a dialogue between capital, government, religion, mind/matter and spirit.

The special cuts that she creates and the doubling of the figures, often create the shape of a female genital organ. This is her way of expressing the criticism she feels about the male takeover of religion and it is also her way of expressing her personal and female distress from this charged issue. Sometimes she also implicitly adds a phallic organ.

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Instagram: @dalia_shsmay