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Michal Na'aman, Israeli Painter, born 1951, Kvutzat Kinneret. For her work Na'aman won the Sandburg Prize in painting in 1998 and 2002. At the end of the 1970s Na'aman began to create an avant garde and conceptual body of work, which included installations and other artistic activities. These works dealt with the expression of the personal and the concept of ars poetica mixed with the public and the political. In addition Na'aman has produced a large body of work using photographs as raw material to paste into collages combined with text. Among her well-known works is a series which combines images of a bird and a fish into an enigmatic creature. In another work, entitled " Killed a Penguin; A Nun was Killed", Na'aman points out the gap between image and language by using a play on words and deviation from the standard meaning of words. At the end of the 1970s, while she was studying in the United States, Na'aman began to return to a more traditional mode of painting. In this period the image of the "Duck-Rabbit", taken from the Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953), also appeared. The source of this image was the "Jastrow illusion," which raises the question of the identity of a visual image and which appears from that time in many of Na'aman's works.
In the 1990s, she started working on a large series of paintings that utilized abstract geometric structures with sexual, psychological and ars poetic elements. Strips of masking tape recycled from earlier works of hers became an integral part of the work, a sort of sloughed off skin or peel. In the 1990s, she started working on a large series of paintings that utilized abstract geometric structures with sexual, psychological and ars poetic elements. Strips of masking tape recycled from earlier works of hers became an integral part of the work, a sort of sloughed off skin or peel.

Education

1972 Graduate of Tel Aviv University, literature and history of art.
Art Teachers' Training College, Ramat Hasharon.
1978-1980 School of Visual Arts, New York.

Teaching

1977-2004 Art Teachers' Training College, Ramat Hasharon
2005 Beit Berl, the School of Art - Hamidrasha, Professor

Awards And Prizes

1978 Scholarship for studies in the USA, America-Israel Cultural Foundation, School of Visual Arts, New York
1981 Jacques and Eugenie Ohana Prize for a Young Israeli Artist, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
1995 George and Janet Jaffin Prize for Excellence in Plastic Arts, America-Israel Cultural Foundation
1995 Prize, Ministry of Science and the Arts
1998 Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Isracard Prize, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, together with Liliane Klapisch
1998 Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem
2002 Dizengoff Prize for Painting and Sculpture, Municipality of Tel Aviv-Jaffa
2002 Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem