Miriam Cabessa

Miriam Cabessa (born 1966) is an Israeli-American painter, performance and installation artist, winner of the 2022 Israeli Ministry of Culture Lifetime Achievement Award.

Miriam Cabessa was born in 1966 in Casablanca, Morocco.

In 1969 she immigrated to Israel together with her family and settled in the city of Tiberias.

At the age of thirteen, she moved to Kibbutz Sha'ar Hagolan in the Jordan Valley.

She grew up in an artistic home: her father was a jazz trumpeter and her mother ran the “Maskit” shop of Tiberias (a state-owned company promoting locally produced fashion and crafts) and founded a sewing school named after her, the “Helen” School.

Cabessa started following private drawing lessons at the age of six and later studied painting at Tel Hai College.

She also trained horses at the farm of Kibbutz Sha'ar Hagolan.

At seventeen she qualified for a brown belt in karate and worked as a karate coach at Kibbutz Afikim.

She was also one of the first windsurfers to windsurf on the Sea of Galilee.

She served in the Israeli army in the mid-1980s and moved to Tel Aviv after completing her military service.

In doing so, she is to be associated with feminist artists from the 1980s such as Barbara Krueger, Cindy Sherman and Sherry Levine, who rather than striving to master the act of painting itself have aimed to question how women could enter the male-dominated world of painting.

Hence the act of ironing touches upon both personal memories - the smell of ironing in Cabessa's childhood home - and a much wider feminist aspiration: to break through social and gender limitations.

Before her departure to New York, Cabessa exhibited at Dvir Gallery a painting series of imaginary urban landscapes of New York City.

In the year 1988, Cabessa studied at the late Kalisher painting school, after which she studied privately with the artist Tamara Rickman for three years.

Cabessa went on to study Fine Art at the Midrasha Art School from 1991 to 1993, and Theory and Criticism at Camera Obscura in 1997.

Soon after completing her degree at the Midrasha, she was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Tel Aviv Art Museum curated by Ellen Ginton.

She gained public attention in 1993 with her first solo exhibition at Dvir Gallery, where she presented a series of paintings on masonite that laid the foundations for her artistic identity: using houseware items such as mops, garbage cans, plates and drinking glasses, Cabessa devised a unique and innovative technique to create painterly representations of three-dimensional pipes.

Although seemingly complex and computer-generated, the works were all handmade by the artist.

The gap between these images and their production process aroused much skepticism and wonder.

The exhibition's works thrived on the Israeli art market and positioned Cabessa as a promising young artist.

In 1995 she became the first winner of the Gottesdiener Prize, sponsored by the Tel Aviv Art Museum and considered as one of the most prestigious prizes for Israeli artists.

At the Gottesdiener Prize exhibition she presented paintings on masonite and graphite works on paper.

The show was accompanied by a catalog.

Her slow action painting has been internationally recognized since 1997 when she represented Israel at the Venice Biennale.

Over the past two decades, she has abstained from using brushes, opting to make marks with objects and her body.

Her imagery ranges from organic to mechanistic with surfaces that are both haptically handmade and digitally serene.

Cabessa has shown extensively in the U.S., Europe, and Israel.

In 1997 Cabessa was chosen by Sarah Breitberg-Semel to represent Israel at the Israeli pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

Cabessa exhibited a series of paintings which notably refined and consolidated the artist's pictural language: the presented black-and-white oil paintings on masonite of abstract swirls and stripes confirmed the artist's high degree of artistic precision, virtuosity and control.

Whereas her show at Dvir Gallery had demonstrated her immense capacity for imagination, the Biennale exhibition established her abilities for restraint and self-discipline.

One of the works in the series is a “30-second painting”, titled after the duration for which Cabessa imprinted her touch on the painting.

Plastik Magazine published a reproduction of this work along with an interview of the artist by Reilly Azoulay.

The use of performative constraints and self-instructions allows Cabessa to reformulate the painterly act as both process-based and conceptually driven.

The “30-second” constraint is borrowed from the military realm; yet the additional instruction to touch the painting's surface with eyes closed serves to turn a masculine principle into a feminine, intimate and sensual act.

This will later lead Cabessa to create public painting performances, exposing to the audience the intimacy of her painting process.

In 1998, Cabessa presented “Mummies”, a series of powerful works produced with a cold and hot iron.

This series mimics the act of ironing in a seemingly desperate attempt to flatten out the surface of the painting, bringing to mind both modernism and the tradition of flat painting.

Cabessa's choice of painting tools is part of a conscious attempt to turn domestic appliances into feminist instruments: she disconnects houseware items from their original function and redefines their purpose within a new and elevated context.

Cabessa has thus transformed garbage cans, rags and squeegees into painting tools.

Cabessa was born in Morocco, raised in Israel, and has lived and worked in New York City since 2000.