Yeshiva University Museum

Between 1976 and 1983, Argentina was under military rule. During this period, Jews were increasingly targeted for kidnapping and torture by the ruling junta. Laura Murlender, a native of Buenos Aires was abducted at the age of nineteen by government forces and placed in solitary confinement. After she was "liberated by mistake," she fled to Tel Aviv where she began rebuilding her "destroyed" identity. Murlender was accepted at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, and began a search for structure and a sense of unity in art by using a variety of media and materials in her oil paintings, mixed media on canvas, works on paper and photography. Through her art, she managed the transition from darkness to light. Her quest is reflected in the different series she developed since 1982, an expression of her personal life history in Black, Red, White and Blue based on photographs Murlender has taken herself of archaeological sites in Israel. Through color and linear grids, the artist transcends the stone walls her Jewish identity has created for her and therein her artwork becomes a timeline for her own personal history.

The exhibition is sponsored, in part, by the Friends of Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.