Sara Benninga’s paintings are replete with motion and expressiveness, shifting in a storm between pronounced contour lines, at times sharp and fragmented, at times soft and liberated; between clear, linear and schematic figures; and between black, compressed figures. She leaves the linen canvas exposed beside a burning splotch of color.
Benninga, who is also an art researcher and former dancer, paints scenes, bordering on the fantastical, of nudes in nature. While she leans on longstanding art traditions, she does so with contemporary directness, at times crude. Each scene contains a familiar, easily identifiable experience, which despite this is enigmatic and even threatening.
The influence of Matisse’s backgrounds and compositions, as well as Gaugin’s molding of figures, is apparent in her paintings. One might say she creates a contemporary version of Expressionism, located on the spectrum between utopian and esoteric. Manet’s renowned painting “The Luncheon on the Grass” (1863) depicts two nude women beside two clothed men in a picnic in a meadow. The woman closest to the foreground directs her gaze at the viewer. Benninga strives to examine what happens in the pleasure garden, in its version as an exclusively female space. She reenacts the situation, expels the men, and directs the women’s gaze inwards, into the space they are in. She thereby liberates the women, perhaps even herself as an artist, from the male presence, from the accepted model of beauty, from excesses of knowledge and from the need to please the viewer

proximity between them, sitting naked on that very same picnic blanket among the bushes, also generate that female sisterhood that is so talked about today? Or perhaps, just one moment after the pastoral sojourn and voluntary uprooting, which, by the way, is not necessarily passive, emotions, urges and fears start to come to the surface, and the intimacy could turn into a battle.
Looking closely, the figures appear to be in upheaval. And what starts out in the paintings Three Women, Three Women and Floral Design, and Four as a space for iconographic recovery, a kind of artistic women’s retreat to heal from the male gaze and establish a non-judgmental female tribe where everything is allowed, turns, in the paintings Attraction, Three Grazias and Behind the Bush into a Bacchanalian arena for experimentation, playful, chaotic, sexual, confusing, seductive and perhaps even dangerous
The pastoral promise of a pleasure garden where beautiful women sit in harmony is indeed truncated together with the body parts, yet the artist’s skilled hand transforms it into a rapid dance, continuing from one painting to the next, from eros to taboo, straddling the line between pleasure and suffering.

The new stage in the series begins to emerge in the painting In the Forest (Blue Black) where the scene appears to break free into abstraction. Bodily fragments and marks which previously delineated “bushes”, “nature” or “body” are transformed into a new web, dark and fascinating, of shapes, textures and materials that beam from the canvas into the gallery space.

Rachel Rotenberg’s impressive wood sculptures maintain a closeness to nature and to the original tone of the red cedar wood from which they are made. The artist, who immigrated to Israel from Baltimore about six years ago, brought the cedar panels to Israel from Canada, the country where she was born. In some of the sculptures she adds to the dialogue between line and form colorful interventions that emphasize, like outlines, the sculpture’s movement in space. In others, she integrates metal and concrete elements with the wood, drawing the viewer’s attention to the distinction between warm and cold hues.
Whether the sculptures stand on the floor or hang from the wall, they have varying relationships with the exhibition space, the viewer and amongst themselves. Some envelop and gape open a void that seems organic and human, a place a body could inhabit. Others have an opening that serves as a peeping window. Yet others illustrate a winding, blossoming space, of which the artist seems to have revealed just a tiny part.