Nurit David works with painting, installation and texts. She belongs to the group of Israeli artists synonymous with the 1970s shift from conceptual art to the “return to painting”. Text and narrative have been central elements in N. David’s work since her beginnings in the 1970s. Her writing is associative, personal and fragmentary in the spirit of the stream of consciousness literature. In her early paintings, the artist’s body is often portrayed as split – feminine/masculine, animalistic/human, trapped in transitional states and internal foreignness. Early in her career, she started to formulate a fictional realm in which the figure of the artist was reborn – first as a Chinese woman (Chinese Works, 1980–1983) and later with strong inspiration from Japanese art and literature (I’m Dancing On Your Grave, 2009) – echoing her eternal sense of foreignness.
Over the years, N. David refused to rest on the laurels of her past successes but rather kept changing her artistic practice. Consequently, every body of work in her oeuvre stands alone as a reinvention rather than progression. In this context, she commented “I have no handwriting. […] the one thing that’s common to it all – from A to Z – is my syntax: I love to juxtapose things that you wouldn’t normally think go together”. (Interview with Hagit Peleg Rotem, Basis Art School Magazine, May 2018). As her story became more and more particular, it also emerged as a collective myth.

In the 1980s, she created monochromatic relief paintings out of whitewash and matches, depicting maps that bear footprints and words, like mental maps of sorts visible in works such as Sister (1987). In the 1990s, she focused on figurative-biographical paintings based on her family photos and set against a backdrop of 1950s spaces such as gardens, pharmacies, staircases and classrooms, an example of this being the oil Milk Or Wine? (In the Pasture) (1995). In the 2000s her works started to incorporate architectural motifs. In the exhibition Care of the Sick (2012), for instance, she painted a hospital on scaffolding and bridal gowns made of Bauhaus buildings. In 2013, she introduced a graphic-digital motif into her paintings, which started to move away from the two-dimensional support of the paintings towards spatial installations of colourful patterns, a digital jumble of shapes that hint at real objects, as in the painting Ga Ga (2013). In Nobody’s Clothing/An Outline for a Business (2017) she placed her works on stands made of corrugated plastic, conjuring associations with textile shops or clothes patterns.

Nurit David graduated from HaMidrasha School of Art Teachers in Ramat HaSharon in 1978. Her works have been featured in solo exhibitions at the most prominent museums in Israel, including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1987; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2007. Her works have also been displayed in numerous solo and group shows and have received awards including the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Israel Ministry of Culture and Education.