The artist Pamela Silver presents "Undercurrents"
Opening of the exhibition: 27/9/2026 at 18:30 pm
Curator: Lola Vilenkin
This exhibition is presented as part of the Jerusalem Biennale 2026.
Created in Jerusalem in the shadow of personal history and a society marked by rupture, Silver’s works transform the past and present into color, rhythm, and movement. The exhibition follows the artist’s transition from darkness into light.
The vibration of unspoken memory bursts forth from the dense blues and shadowed tonalities. Layer by layer, through swirling bursts of color, the surface begins to shift. As pigments disperse and strokes loosen, the compositions gravitate toward the circular and the centered—toward the archetype of the mandala. For Carl Jung, the mandala is a compensatory force that emerges spontaneously during periods of intense psychological chaos or disorientation. In Silver’s works, these centralizing forms act as a safe haven, imposing a rhythmic order upon the chaotic psychic state. This process enables what Jung termed individuation∫ the integration of fragmented aspects of the self into a unified, complex whole. By moving toward a visual center, Silver’s work navigates this journey, seeking a restorative stability amidst the wreckage of trauma.
The artist’s childhood spent in Africa and her family’s history of displacement intersect with the collective trauma of wartime upheaval. Without depicting figurative tragedy, her work bears the imprint of a society attempting to restore equilibrium after collective shock and her luminous compositions operate as metaphors for social recovery. Silver’s abstracts reject the inertia of despair through wash over wash and gesture over gesture—each layer acknowledging the preceding one, while refusing to remain bound by it. Watercolor and monotype, her primary mediums, are themselves metaphors for this psychological terrain. Their liquidity allows pigments to bleed and evolve like memories surfacing and dissipating, rewarding the artist’s willingness to lose control.
The exhibition creates a space where viewers can pause, feel, and rethink. Silver’s art charts an emotional trajectory that mirrors the journey many people experience after crisis. At a time when the region continues to absorb the reverberations of conflict, Silver’s visual language serves as a collective agent of healing which, through the power of abstraction, affirms that color returns, and with it, the possibility of hope.
