Bidspirit auction | Marina Betel Levitan

Marina Betel Levitan - ”Breaking Point” 2025. Oil on canvas  50/50 cm Signed Marina Betel Levitan's work moves on the axis between everyday observation and a philosophical exploration of time, memory and consciousness. Through figurative painting with an affinity for abstraction, she seeks to understand the reality around her - not only as it appears, but as it is experienced, broken down and rebuilt in the human mind. For Levitan, painting is a means of thinking and understanding. From simple objects, fleeting moments, portraits, landscapes and still lifes, she seeks hidden harmony and unexpected perspectives, allowing the viewer to dwell anew on what seems familiar. Her works seek to surprise - herself and the observer - by distilling a single moment and transforming it into a space charged with time, memory and emotion. Time is one of the central elements in her work. Levitan deals with the way in which time changes form, material and consciousness, and with the relationships that arise between different moments of observation: the time required to build the painting in layers, the time in which the object changes before the painter's eyes, the time of memory, and the time of the observer's viewing of the finished work. She explores the gap between what can be grasped and what is already passing and disappearing. Her pictorial language combines figurative precision with formal decomposition and compositional freedom. The compositions are dynamic and at times broken and clashing, creating a tension between stability and disintegration. Even when they appear in still lifes, landscapes or portraits, they are charged with a sense of drama and uncertainty, as if they are in constant motion between presence and disappearance. Her paintings are done mainly in oil on canvas and sometimes also on plywood, in a palette of cold, muted colors that create a sense of mystery and charged silence. From the layers of color and broken spaces, partial figures, glances, or individual details sometimes emerge - eyes looking out from the unknown - as hints of memory, absence and a hidden human presence. Levitan also observes the impact of the current period on her inner world: wars, places that have been erased from reality but continue to exist in memory, and the recognition of the fragility of human existence. Alongside the knowledge of the limitations of human time, her work also deals with the idea of ​​eternity - in the relationship between the micro and the macro, between the private and the cosmic, and between what passes and what remains. Levitan is a graduate of the Visual Communication Department at Bezalel - the Israeli Academy of Art and Design and a graduate of the Jerusalem Studio School painting and drawing workshop led by Israel Hirshberg. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Israel and around the world, including in London, Seattle and Italy, as well as in international residency programs. Her work continues to develop from a constant dialogue between observing reality and attempting to transcend it - to the place where painting becomes an exploration of time, memory and human existence.