Bidspirit auction | Ayelet Polak

Ayelet Polak - ''The Pool with the Red Flower'' 2025. For the first time in KooKoo, meet the artist Ayelet Polak Oil on canvas mounted on wood framed 29/33 cm Signed Ayelet Polak's painting is born from an unmediated encounter with nature - not from a photograph, memory or an intermediary image, but from an actual presence within the landscape itself. For Polak, sensory experience is a necessary condition for creation. Observing the changing light, the wind, the earth and the cycles of life is the starting point from which the painting is built. Her works are concerned with the search for elusive peak moments in nature - a flower in full bloom, a momentary change in light, or a sense of depth and silence that are revealed precisely in simplicity. Sometimes a single flower is enough to become the center from which an entire world develops. Layer after layer, in oil paints, charcoal and pencil, she builds a pictorial space in which reality and inner experience intertwine. Alongside her commitment to realistic observation, Polak allows imagination and emotion to reshape the landscape. She does not seek merely to describe a place, but to create an experience - an independent space where light, color and composition carry memory, emotion and consciousness. Her paintings range between classical precision and poetic softness, and are influenced by the realist tradition, Renaissance artists and Impressionists, alongside a personal intuitive and spiritual voice. The landscape of the Land of Israel, and especially the southern Hebron Hills, is a central source of inspiration in her work. It is precisely in the bare earth, the subdued colours and the seasons of transition that she finds depth, power and inner peace. For her, nature is not just a subject for painting but a living, breathing space of listening and observation - a place where fragility and resilience, movement and silence coexist. Polak grew up on a kibbutz, and as a child she found in art and music a personal space of freedom and connection. From a young age she painted, played and sang, out of a deep inner need to express emotional and dreamy worlds. She later turned to professional painting studies with artists Tuvia Katz, Silvia Baram, Renana Termechi, Smadar Katz and Ruthie Ventura, and delved into classical realism studies. Her working process begins with precise pencil and charcoal drawings, and gradually develops into multi-layered, slow and profound oil paintings. Alongside technical skill, she seeks to allow the inner and intuitive place to lead the work - a place where the painting becomes a deeply human and spiritual expression. Alongside her landscape paintings, Polak also creates still lifes in oil, works with an emotional and impressionistic quality, in which color and light take on a vivid and free, almost poetic presence. Ayelet Polak's paintings invite the viewer to pause, breathe, and enter another time - a time of listening, of silence, and of a renewed encounter with nature not as an external sight alone, but as an internal experience of memory, emotion, and full presence.