Tavalina

Tavalina, Rinat Kishony, was born in Haifa, Israel in 1966. She trained as an architect, graduating from the Israel Institute of Technology (the Technion) in 1992, and worked in Tel Aviv for several years — winning a competition to redesign the multimedia museum dedicated to the former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Then, after a personal crisis in her thirtieth year, she began to paint. She has described going to her room, finding a discarded box of crayons, and drawing as if in a trance: "the paintings were flowing out of me… and until this very day I haven't stopped."

Rinat abandoned architecture for painting. She left Israel and traveled for several years before settling in Italy with her husband and daughters, painting there and showing in galleries across the north. After a decade abroad she returned to Israel, and now lives and works in Aviel, a village in the northern Sharon. The hills, lakes and villages of both countries run through her work — Bardolino and San Gimignano alongside Givat Adda and the fields behind her own house.

She paints in acrylic, and primarily with a palette knife rather than a brush. The method allows both directions of her process: building the surface up in ridges of colour, then cutting back into it, removing and reducing until the image resolves. She notes:

"The white canvas, for me, is the embodiment of freedom: it contains an infinite number of possibilities. That is why, at the beginning of the creative process, I must explore a topic, a question, define the rules of the game, and thus limit the boundaries of my process. A conversation then arises between my internal feelings and what is materializing on the canvas, like a continuous melody."

Tavalina holds an MA in art therapy from the College for Society and the Arts and works as a supervising psychotherapist. She is on staff at Soteria Sharon, a residential house that supports people through psychological crisis as an alternative to hospitalization, and leads its Soteria Salon at Kibbutz Ein Shemer — where one of the weekly programmes is an artists' greenhouse. She believes that "a person's personal development never ends. Every stage in life, including the critical stage, is a potential for development and self-knowledge."

Recognition:

• Amos Oz book cover — Tavalina's painting Jerusalem (2020) was selected for the cover of Œuvres, the collected works of the Israeli novelist, published by Gallimard in its Quarto series (2022). The volume was conceived with Oz before his death and includes contributions from his daughter, the historian Fania Oz-Salzberger.
• European Confederation of Art Critics — 2nd Prize, Painting. Awarded at the Biennale of Chianciano, Chianciano Art Museum, Italy (2011).
• Institutional solo exhibition — Umbria: colori e forme at the Italian Cultural Institute, Haifa (2012).

Selected Exhibitions:

• 2008 — Galleria Zaztoy, Antibes, France
• 2009 — Galleria INPOLLIN, Treviso, Italy (curated by Raz Degan)
• 2012 — Gagliardi Gallery, London
• 2013 — Museo d’Arte e Scienza, Milan
• 2019 — Galleria Giustizia Vecchia, solo exhibition, Verona, Italy
• 2021 — Art House SF, Where the Infinite Starts, San Francisco, USA
• 2022 — Art House SF, Windows Beyond, San Francisco, USA
• 2025 — Art House SF, Peeling the Layers, San Francisco, USA

Original paintings are held in private collections in the United States (California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Hawaii, and Washington, D.C.), Europe (the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria), Israel, and Australia.