A daughter to immigrants from Tunisia, Khen Shish grew up in a traditional Jewish family. She earned a BFA from the Art Institute at the Oranim Academic College, Kiryat Tivon in 1995, and an MFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem in 1999. She lives and works in Tel Aviv.
From the onset of her career, K. Shish brought a powerful and extrovert female voice into her artistic practice, often incorporating labour-intensive crafts. Her early installations, Khen-Djamila (1999-2002), Birthday (2003) or Nerves Sing (2008), to mention a few, were built as total environments that combined painting, drawing, paper collages, monitors and objects, while using “low” craft materials like masking tape, gold wrappers, stickers, Xerox photocopies and red ribbons. At the very beginning of her career the use of these materials was due to a lack of choice, an urge to create with everything that was available. Only later did it become a conceptual aesthetic choice.
K. Shish’s expressionist-baroque-romantic painting style is characterised by redundancy, multi-layered, expressive brushstrokes, painting with paint squeezed directly from the tube or with the fingers. This turbulent urgency coexists alongside delicate and lyrical single line drawings. On paper, canvas or found cardboard piece, in monumental or small scale, every line or brushstroke in K. Shish’s painting is autobiographical. Over the years, K. Shish has established a visual lexicon that has become her idiosyncratic signature and personal mythology. Her works feature recurrent symbols, shapes and human-animalistic creatures that configure her pictorial language – eye-tear-leaf-boat, horizontal heart, bent flower, bottomless vase, pregnant bird or crying crow – through which she tackles the question of beauty and invents a new syntax that oscillates between the sublime and the mundane.

K. Shish’s work often engages with her Mizrahi (Eastern, North African) origin, identity and feminism. Alongside red, pink, gold and white, black is the colour most identified with her work. Hers is a deep, scorched, sooty black that encapsulates the overt and covert facets of her biography. The choice of black is not merely aesthetic, but rather a defiant and emotional political position. In her self-portraits (photo collages) she gouges out or blackens her eyes and covers her mouth with masking tape, as in Gouging the Queen’s Eyes Out (2006). In her painting Rather Nice (2003), she attached a photo of Prime Minister Golda Meir, next to a red inscription that reads “Rather nice” – a sarcastic paraphrase of G. Meir’s notorious 1971 comment on the Israeli Black Panthers: “They are not nice”. K. Shish’s works include blackened acrylic paintings and collage on paper and cardboard, pinned to wooden poles like black flags or protest signs, as in When the Sun Vanishes (2020). The colour black is prevalent in K. Shish’s political-artistic discourse, as both a construct and as a transformative question.

Over the years, K. Shish has won numerous awards, including the Landau Foundation Award for Painting in 2013. Her works are exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, and included in museum and private collections.