Niv Bornstein paints assemblages of emotional scenes alongside reality, staging on the canvas a new world that portrays memories of the past and a sobering confrontation with the routines of daily life. He draws and paints a collage of his personal story and inner world, oscillating between revelation and concealment. The false and the true intermingle, generating questions about place and essence, good and evil, the revealed and the hidden.

For Bornstein, painting and illustration serve as tools of writing, and the images become, for him, a kind of new script through which he forges a near-distant connection with the viewer. He borrows imagery from both the popular visual world and the historical-scientific realm—drawing from fairy tales, scientific illustrations, and small sketches from ancient books.

His evolving narrative—capable of taking on different forms according to context—depicts scenes that explore the human factor and its physical acts in relation to food, sex, and home. Bornstein approaches the act of painting as a silent film production. The casting and directing of objects and characters, and the construction of frames, create a cinematic moment suspended in time.

“The universe suckles the Milky Way

the Milky Way suckles the solar system

the solar system suckles the Earth

the Earth suckles us into itself….”

— Rachel Chalfi, The Book of Creatures, Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing, Tel Aviv, 2011