Michal Rovner

Michal Rovner (b. 1957, Tel Aviv, Israel) employs drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation, creating works that shift between the poetic and the political to explore questions of nature, identity, dislocation, and the fragility of human existence. Her early work is characterized by the distortion of color and blurring of imagery. The series Outside (1990–91) and Decoy (1991) focus on images of encampment and surveillance, abstracted through a process of reprinting. By the late 1990s, her blurred figures coalesced into migrating crowds in dream-like worlds, using cyclical repetition and duration as a device.

She received a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2002, which featured her multichannel video work Time Left (2002), depicting thousands of marching ambiguous silhouetted figures. This work was presented again the following year at the Venice Biennale where she was selected to represent Israel. In the mid-2000s, Rovner became fascinated with how geological objects telegraph history across time, creating site-specific and archaeologically driven works that merge video with sculpture through projection. In 2013, Rovner created Traces of Life, a permanent installation at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum devoted to the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Shoah.

The artist studied cinema, television, and philosophy at Tel Aviv University before enrolling at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in 1981, receiving a BFA in photography and art in 1985. In 1978 she co-founded the Camera Obscura School of Art in Tel Aviv. Rovner has mounted more than 50 solo exhibitions and received many awards, including France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She was the first artist permitted to install works on the Louvre Museum’s Cour Napoléon plaza. The artist lives and works in Jerusalem and New York.