Exhibitions

All the girls painted by Mira Hermoni Levin are one. Always in a white dress accentuating the right shoulder, erected. Their short light hair is sometimes fastened with a hairpin. It frames a somewhat schematic or frozen face wearing a sad expression, and covers the ears which are perhaps nonexistent. The palms and the legs are hidden or missing, inactive or not meant to be active. These girls have no life in them. They stand facing us, looking smart and pretty. Their white dresses are intrinsic to their slim body accentuating their lack of life. They are all Mira.

One Mira died back then, in the Holocaust, and the other Mira was born here when the state of Israel was established. Both have the same father and different mothers. They stand out against the dark backdrop. The color of their hair matches the color of the tablecloth covering the round table in the adjacent  picture.

Both girls were envisioned by Mira- a  self taught artist, who conceived her sister in her own image.

In her book, Mira The Most, which was published in 2017, the living Mira updates her dead sister on what has happened within the family after her death. Indeed, the girls remain lifeless but longing and love draw them closer to life. In her imagination the artist reaches out to her sister and enables her “to go wild, dancing the night away” in the artist’s own words.

Another cluster of paintings, Still Life And The Street, lacks human figures although it was meant to serve as their backdrop. The pallet of browns is illuminated by a white light, a white dish, a white building, accentuating to the full the girls’ lack of vitality.

Meira Perri Lahaman

Editing: Hava Rimon