The Negev Museum of Art is honored to present the exhibition A Feast for the Eyes by Khen Shish, one of the prominent and prolific artists of the generation that emerged in the mid-1990s in Israel. Shish is an artist who has a distinct painting language, a captivating world of painting, and a generous artistic temperament. Born in Safed to parents who came from Tunisia, she studied art at Oranim College, Bezalel Academy, and Camera Obscura. After living, working, and exhibiting in international cultural capitals like Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, and New York, today she lives and works in Tel Aviv.

The many-eyed exhibition before us is the outcome of elaborating, refining, and expanding Khen Shish’s exploration of the eye motif, which has been a part of her art for three decades. “Just one thwacking visual haze / against the window where her eyes gaze. / She saw. She understood. Deepening the depth, / she closed her eyes and beheld plenty / and gold. / She was brimming / with gold,” wrote the poet Yonit Naaman in a poem dedicated to Shish, describing the vision, the fantastical gaze, mythological sight, and generous painting characteristic of Shish.

But Shish’s painting does not only crave eyes, it is also pleasing to the eyes, spectacular, attractive, and seductive in its appearance, like the temptation in the Garden of Eden, often linked with Shish’s paintings: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” Indeed, what unfolds before us is a plethora of eyes, a world of eyes, a world inside eyes, an eye for an eye.

Curator Ron Bartos