A pioneer of conceptual art in Israel, Efrat Natan’s multidisciplinary practice presents a unique fusion of minimalism, body art and performance. Oscillating between the personal and the collective, her work examines the very symbols that constitute Israeli consciousness.
Between 1968 and 1970, E. Natan studied painting at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv. Later, she studied privately with leading Israeli artist Raffi Lavie (1937–2007), where she was exposed to the international vanguard movements of the 1960s and 1970s. These influences helped E. Natan form a distinct vocabulary that melds the formal with the conceptual, the political with the aesthetic and private memories with shared experiences.
E. Natan’s work brings together a wide variety of inspirations, ranging from her upbringing on a Kibbutz and inculcation with Zionist myths, to cosmology, Egyptian art, Christianity, American minimalism, Fluxus and German expressionism. Early in her career, she explored the use of her own body as a medium and as a means of social and political critique. In Head Sculpture (May 1973), E. Natan marched through the streets of Tel Aviv with a T-shaped wooden sculpture placed on top of her shoulders. By obscuring her head in its entirety and limiting her vision, the work is shown to be both an exploration of the body as an artistic tool and a piercing commentary on Israeli military culture.

In Roof Work (1979), which was exhibited on the roof of the artist’s residence, E. Natan presented an assembly of ready-made materials – namely undershirts and records – that were arranged so as to represent the various stages in a human life cycle. With the objects acting as surrogates of the artist’s body, this work – part action, part installation – wove discrete connections between early Zionism and Christianity.

Between 1979 and 1992, E. Natan exhibited no new work. In the mid-1990s, she began to incorporate her personal biography into her practice, extrapolating on the lexicon she had developed early in her oeuvre. Thus, for example, the undershirts from Roof Work evolved into a leitmotif that evokes the memory of the body and her interest in Christianity, echoing her performances and actions of previous years.

In 2016, E. Natan held a retrospective exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where she presented her large-scale work Swing of the Scythe Sculpture (2002), which is also part of the museum’s collection. A manifestation of her decades-long artistic investigation expressed in a three-dimensional format, this sculpture evokes themes such as the artist’s childhood, her practice as a body artist, the Zionist ethos of the pioneer, medieval imagery and early photography. It speaks of the decay of the utopian dream of Zionism and brings forth the violence inherent in Israeli culture.

E. Natan is the recipient of the Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art (2013) and the Creativity Encouragement Prize from the Israeli Ministry of Culture and Sport (2000, 2006). She served as a curator in the Youth Wing for Art Education at the Israel Museum between 1986–2008, and in 2008 she co-curated the major exhibition Real Time: Sixty Years in Israeli Art at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.