EHXIBITION

DANCE OF THE MAENADS

Solo Exhibition
Curator: Assaf Rahat
Artspace TLV, Israel
July 2026

1/6

2025, ink, graphite and oil on canvas, 100x140 cm

“One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star”

writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue, Section 5), and his words resonate with me, evoking the birth of the body of work presented in this exhibition. A wild, tumultuous, wondrous, and ecstatic birth – birth from the body and from worlds beyond words.

In the studio, the ink swirls in the rivulets of water splashed onto unstretched canvases spread on the floor. Fingers and rags guide the tracing of images, like a tempestuous and ecstatic labor awaiting the night’s rest to dry.

In the days that follow, the images gradually emerge before me, gaining recognition through acts of revealing and concealing, subtracting and drawing, as in a protracted struggle between myself and them over the degree of their presence through subtle allusion and transparency.

Anat Ofer

Dance of the Maenads, 2025, ink, graphite, and oil on canvas, 82x110 cm

Dance of the Maenads

The works of artist Anat Ofer are the expressive outcome of an unbridled physical movement during the creative process, which leaves its imprint on the canvas. These are ink, graphite, and oil paintings on canvas that occasionally incorporate sand. The works seem to portray a sort of birth, where skeletal, spectral bodies emerge and burst forth in a primal dance out of the earthy mud that coats them. The monochromatic tones that dominate the paintings are evocative of mud, soil, moss, and rock-like chalkiness.

The figures take on flesh and bone, like the skeletons that rise to life in the Vision of the Dry Bones. Yet, while the vision of the prophet Ezekiel serves as a parable for the mythical oscillation between death and life in the Resurrection or the revival of the people of Israel in their land, Ofer’s works do not realize a prophetic vision steeped in pathos. Rather, they invite the viewer to partake in a wild, pagan, and ecstatic experience of endless movement – like the mythological dance of the Maenads. In the Dionysian cult, the Maenads are female figures free from the shackles of society and public order, who give free rein to Eros and primal urges through their animalistic and violent dance movements.

Alongside an intoxicated stupor and a wild, libidinal release, the ritual also summoned moments of transcendence, spiritual metamorphosis, and creation. While performing their frenzied dance, the Maenads sometimes skin animals, donning the pelts on their own bodies, tear apart a bull embodying the god Dionysus and consume its raw flesh, perhaps as a symbolic act of patricide, accompanied by ecstatic expressions of instinctual lust.

Unlike the female Maenads from Greek mythology, Ofer’s Maenads lack a distinct gender identity. They can appear masculine and feminine at once, an ambiguity that renders their dance even more transgressive. Furthermore, the crowded physical interactions inscribed as movement across the canvas may seem at times compassionate and empathetic, aggressive and violent, or sexual and invasive. The viewer’s perception is undermined, and human touch is experienced as simultaneously threatening and alluring.

Ofer’s Maenads have no god, or a godlike bull, that they can slaughter and consume in a sublimated and violent act of catharsis. All they can do is to continue moving ecstatically and dance for all eternity. Similarly, the artist has no god she can devour while testing moral boundaries and social conventions, but she does have a canvas. The canvas is her bull; she cannot consume its flesh, yet she can try to break through its limits as a static, flat, and depthless medium. In that sense, Anat Ofer’s works push the boundaries of the canvas with their excess and wild, boundless movement that realizes a pagan cult, a cult with no father figure, mother, or god.

Ofer’s works engage in a dialogue of composition, material, color palette, movement, and expression with iconic artists from the history of Western art. The human figures in El Greco’s tumultuous, physical, and swirling compositions appear vibrating and undulating, like a triangle that snakes towards the crucified and hidden God. In Bacon’s paintings, the fleshy, bleeding bodies ooze, move, and writhe as struggling, solitary figures who, in their existential solitude, try to breach the borders of the flat geometric spaces.

Unlike these artists, Ofer, with the labyrinth of her figures’ movements, unfolds a vision that is not the prophetic vision of Ezekiel or El Greco, nor Bacon’s visceral, intensely expressive, godless and soulless vision. Ofer’s works hold a vision of limitless movement, stretching between death at one end and life at the other, a movement that is at times painful, and other times compassionate, violent, or sexual. This movement strives to break through the confines of the canvas, just as humans attempt to break through the rigid boundaries of life and death.

Anat Ofer’s Dance of the Maenads body of work is a vision of human courage and immense beauty.

Assaf Rahat

2025, ink, graphite and oil on canvas, 125x200 cm

“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.
Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in memory renews my fear:”[1]

The profound and evocative encounter with the works of Anat Ofer reminded me of Dante Alighieri’s wanderings through the dark forest at the beginning of his journey, engulfed by dread as he attempts to forge a path out towards expanses of light. In The Divine Comedy, the dark forest is an allegory for the loss of a spiritual path, moral confusion, and the descent into the depravities of human society. Dante wrote this masterpiece during his forced wanderings, following an absentia trial and a death sentence should he ever return to Florence. Due to a lengthy civil strife between rival factions in 13th-century Florence, he would spend the rest of his life in exile.

Ofer’s works were also created during a brutal war, the likes of which we have never experienced (2024–2025), a time of deepening political division between the factions living together in this place. The intense achromatic colors and ominous darkness elicit a sense of urgency, a maelstrom on the edge of the abyss and moments of dread, interwoven with moments of holding on and closeness, in the midst of an endless war. It feels like the earth is shaking beneath our feet, as world orders unravel and the individual is left alone and vulnerable in the face of evil, having lost his way.

Out of the chaos of collective trauma, out of the darkness, our eyes gradually discern nebulous figures that bear no indicators of gender, time, or place; human figures. Stripped of colors, the world on the canvas looks like a ghostly apparition, but within it, a new human movement is born. A hand reaches out, seeking touch, an arm embraces a shoulder, a head leans on another, legs begin to move towards a dance that represents a yearning for life, standing against the “dark forest” and searching for an exit route from the loss of way.

The blackish gray ink has stained the canvas with feverish, intense, and unrestrained body movements, like the gestures of a primal ritualistic dance, conjuring a cry on the canvas, as if in defiance of the muteness and stasis in the face of traumatic chaos.

Anat Ofer’s artistic testimony is a transformative, metaphoric testimony,[1] which invites us, its addressees, into the traumatic lacuna, to observe it and to touch the pain. Only this will grant us true permission to move away from the edges of the wound and the boundaries of its existence, through a dialectical movement that re-establishes equilibrium between the present and the absent, between the symbolic and madness, between the familiar and the uncanny, and between knowing and unknowing.

Dr. Dina von-Schwarze Mastai

[1] The opening lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by Allen Mendelbaum (extracted 19/5/2026 from “Digital Dante,” https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-1/).

[2] The term “metaphoric testimony” was coined by Professor Dana Amir in her book Bearing Witness to the Witness (2018), in reference to one of the four modes of traumatic testimony.

2026, ink and graphite on canvas, 151x107 cm

A paintbrush of spirits and demons

Her paintbrush

Took her hand and gave her

A small shudder of pleasure

Such was the desire of that thin thread of fate

that demands blind obedience from the painter

and keeps a special light just for them, provided

they are able to solve the enigma of their own nature.

And there she found pure

almost sinful pleasure

as she unleashed her spirits and demons

into the great danse macabre

at the eye of the turmoils

between the flock and the slaughter

in this biblical moment.

Now you are free to rattle your fetid

beautiful ivory bones

free to tear off your dresses of flesh

your painted-on faces.

Cast away the personas from your true faces

movement requires no face or name

It has only one nature

Freedom.

Ran Tenenbaum

Passion, violence and the lust for life. Anat Ofer in a turbulent solo exhibition – the Dance of the Maenads

ARToday, July 12, 2026

“The exhibition is like the cry of life, s in childbirth. To live is to be in pain. This is my life experience, which I express in my art.” Gilli Sitton met Anat Ofer for a conversation and interview on the relations between drives and creation.

Hello Anat, we are sitting here, inside your exhibition “Dance of the Maenads” at ArtSpace in Kiriat Hamlacha – tell me a bit about how the exhibition came together and ended up here.

The exhibition features seven works representing a broader body of work of about fifty pieces, made over the past three years. ArtSpace is hosting me following a proposal I’ve sent to Yair Barak, the head curator, which he accepted.

Assaf Rahat is the exhibition’s curator.

Right, Assaf has accompanied me over the past year, and we selected the works together. We’ve added the two large portraits at the last moment; they are like a dramatic enlargement of figures that appear in the works, but are hinted at, blurred, revealed only through extensive observation.

What interests you in these figures? Do they have any references?

The figures are about vitality, humanity, and interpersonal relations, through the muddling of the boundaries between struggle, passion, and violence. The preoccupation with mobility and touch is [SN1] expressed in the actual work process.

The figures have no reference points; they are born of themselves. However, the allusions to Dante’s The Divine Comedy and to The Dance of the Maenads and the Vision of the Dry Bones represent worlds that, as Assaf has put it well in the exhibition text, I delve deeply into, being a writer and a poet as well. Once a year I settle in a European city, explore its museums, absorb, and paint.

Over the past two years, I have spent time with works by Goya and Rubens and others of their time, drawing from them the movement and the stormy violence of the painted mythological stories, as well as their exquisite and almost sterile picturesqueness. I focus on observing the movement and the experience, the order in the chaos, as I draw inspiration from them. The work on the canvas is first and foremost passionate, motorial, and only then the images are revealed.

I spent a lot of time observing, seeing shapes, light and shadow, color splashes. I do not paint from the head but rather from references that memories have made. It is an important part of my creative process, and often it interests me more than the images.

What is your artistic background? And how does it trickle into the art?

My grandmother founded the Nora [SN2] Gallery in Jerusalem in 1942 - one of the first galleries in the country. My mother managed it until close to her passing. I was raised in the gallery and art has sustained me from a very young age. On the one hand, I’ve been familiar with the cultural and academic figures of Rehavia, and on the other hand, with the many artists visiting the gallery. In my home, art and culture were very present – of the highest value, the premier issue. Having been born an artist, in an environment of art and art lovers, I developed in other art fields too.

I hold a BA degree in Hebrew Literature and musicology, and I graduated from the Academy of Music, studying the flute. Still, I’ve always made art and had a studio at home. I had my first solo exhibition at the Limbus Gallery in Tel Aviv, and it was reviewed at the time by the critic Uzi Tzur in the Ha’aretz daily. In my late 20s, while studying graphic design and working with top designers, such as Dan Reisinger and Eliezer Weishoff [SN3], I also worked on theater set design and on film sets. In New York, I studied art under the painter Simon Dinerstein, whose works have been acquired by museums in the U.S., and with whom I remain in touch to this day. During another chapter of my life, in California, I took classes at Berkeley and San Francisco, and exhibited my work there several times. It was there that I decided to abandon the path to a musical career and concentrate solely on fine art: drawing, painting, and sculpture. Later, my ongoing artistic work has led me to train as an art therapist and psychotherapist, and I worked as an art therapist and senior staff member at a mental health clinic.

Tell me a little about your technique.

A few years ago, I discovered the wonders of ink on large canvases. The canvas is about the size of my outstretched arms.

The process begins with water painting—I spread the canvas on the floor and start by painting with a brush tied to a stick, using only water. The work begins quickly, with droppers dripping ink that spreads through the water. After a few layers have dried, I reveal the figures by wiping the canvas with rags. Then I begin the second stage of the work, in which the figures emerge from the stains. I hardly ever work with brushes, but rather with rags, which I use to absorb the moisture and wipe away the ink after it has dried to varying degrees. The physical and gestural labor is a significant part of the process, leaving traces on the canvas and, through the act of scraping, revealing the unconscious as well.

The exhibition features two mixed-media works, using black and brown ink and oil paints. These works are from a different series, made through a more planned and less impulsive [SN4] process.

The exhibition is titled “The Dance of the Maenads.” What does this title reveal about it?

Assaf Rahat gave the exhibition its title. The Maenads, also known as “Bacchants,” are the wild followers and companions of Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy in ancient Greek mythology. Assaf found in these mythological figures the very themes that have preoccupied me and continue to do so. The triangle of madness, passion, and violence, expressed through ecstatic movement and touch, in both the process and the outcome. This body of work reveals a turbulent inner world, expressing terror, yet is full of life, lust for life, and passion.

The exhibition might be the cry of life, as in childbirth: to live is to suffer. It is, among other things, my own experience of life, which I express through my art.

What would you like to say to the visitors to the exhibition?

I would say the exhibition serves as a representative, tangible, and vivid sample of a broad body of work featured in the wonderful catalog that Marina Kotler has designed. And I hope that it will find a large, appropriate display space in the future.

The catalog presents the works comprehensively and also includes fascinating texts by Assaf Rahat, Dr. Dina von Schwarze-Mastai (the director of the clinic where I had worked, who is a Ph.D. in literature, a clinical psychologist, translator, and poet), and a wonderful poem by Ran Tenenbaum, who, along with his partner Guy Avital, provided me with an ideal nurturing environment for the gestation and birth of this exhibition.

by ARToday