Recent Israeli artists seek to fortify themselves within the personal realm; it is their stance to refuse to allow the harsh reality to undermine sanity or snatch away the right to privacy. - Tali Tamir In recent years, a number of artists have turned away from the conflicts of national life to explore their own personal, often idiosyncratic, visions of reality. Their art reflects a turning inward and detachment from broader national issues to confront concerns about gender, religion, and ethnicity, as well as their own autobiographies. Israeli artists have increasingly come to value the irreplaceable individual as an important theme for aesthetic expression. Their work may be deeply intimate or filled with the commonplace details of life, but it always questions the nature of identity--real, assumed, invented, cultural, national, individual. Personal revelation is present to varying degrees in all of the works that explore facets of individual identity. Yet, even in the work of artists who express extremely subjective experiences, if we dig deeper we are likely to find an elegy for the victims of war or a response to the stress of living in Israel.
			Nurit David Buba and Thistle, 1997 Oil on canvas Lent by Givon Art Gallery Ltd., Tel Aviv The artist's autobiographical narratives are filled with psychological and iconographic images that represent the phases and changes in her life. She often locates her figures within a stairway, a transitional space in which the story of her family unfolds. Her characters are manipulated like puppets, alluding to the individual who can – or cannot – be taken apart and put back together.