NEW YORK CITY.- Yeshiva University Museum announces an exhibition of works by contemporary artist Laura Murlender. A native of Buenos Aires, Murlender was abducted by Argentinean military government officials at the age of 19, and held in solitary confinement for 11 days, seeing only darkness. “Liberated by mistake” as revealed in recently found documents, she arrived in Israel in 1976. Israel gave her the possibility to rebuild herself through the act of creation, graduating from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in 1982.

Murlender’s work reflects her continuous search for structure and unity in art by using a variety of media and materials in her oil paintings, mixed media on canvas, works on paper and photography. The struggle between rational comprehension and irrational feeling is mirrored in her work, expressed as a balanced tension between grids, layers, textures and colors.For Murlender, colors act as metaphors in her personal history.

Among the works on view are Murlender’s own photographs of Israeli archaeological sites that have been overlaid with paint and other materials. The resulting canvases juxtapose the old with the new: ancient sites join the present among varying fields of space and color.

Murlender has had solo and group exhibitions in Europe and throughout the Americas. Her work is included in public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Latin-American Art in La Plata, Argentina and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, as well as private collections in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Israel, France, Denmark and Spain. She lives and works in New York City and Buenos Aires. In 2007 she was an artist in residence at Makor Gallery in New York City.

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