Noa Shay is an artist of contrasts. A sculptor and painter who spent a decade in New York, she returned to Israel and, after years of focusing on figurative work and three-dimensional art, now presents an exhibition that threads together drawing, fresco, painting, and sculpture.
Circling between Darkness and Light, on view at Rothschild Fine Art in Tel Aviv, is a body of work that wrestles with the anxieties of contemporary reality, yet also radiates energy, grace, and resilience.
Shay’s artistic path has been marked by restlessness and discovery. “I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, to see what the world had to offer,” she says of her move to New York, where she pursued a master’s degree in painting at Brooklyn College. Immersed in museums, galleries, and studios, she expanded her horizons in ways that would later echo through her work.
A decade abroad in New York
“I felt I needed more tools,” she explains. That hunger led her into sculpture, where she experimented with unlikely materials such as salt, sugar, and wire, transforming fragile drawings into three-dimensional forms. These works grappled with weighty emotional terrain: the fears of motherhood, the shadow of war, the anguish of sending children to the war front.
“I did a work of a shield of pregnant women, a line of figures that looked like a knight’s shield,” she recalls. "It was in salt, frozen in time. The material itself creates a certain nuance, a surprise, an intensity.”
Her decade abroad was both formative and challenging. “We were there for 10 years, and we had to decide whether to stay forever or come home. We tried to come home so we would have family and be Israeli,” she explains, recalling her return with her young son. The process of reacclimating was, in her words, “familiar but also foreign,” a tension that quietly found its way into her art.
Over time, she felt drawn back to painting and to the charged presence of color. “Color has a certain power and energy,” she says. “It sometimes helps you get up when it’s hard. The three red works that hang together in the exhibition create a strong effect of this color for the viewer.”
Her works, from oil paintings to frescoes like Peacock Fight and Swan Song, mirror the turbulence of the present. Colliding forces, literal and symbolic, course through the exhibition. Yet within these clashes, tenderness emerges.
“This wrestling sometimes looks like a hug,” Shay observes. “Maybe it’s not your enemy, maybe it’s your brother.” Her charcoal drawing, Hug I, embodies this fragile balance between struggle and intimacy.
Inspiration in weight and lightness
A second motif runs through the show: the dance between weight and lightness. Shay finds inspiration in sumo wrestlers, whose surprising grace belies their mass, and in birds, whose improbable flight defies gravity.
“I felt a certain oppression and something that weighs me down and also a desire to rise,” she explains. This duality, heaviness, and levity reverberate across her paintings, drawings, and sculptures.
For Shay, every medium is a language, a way of circling a visual idea from different angles. Fresco, oil, sculpture – each acts with its own rhythm and resistance.
“Every technique behaves differently,” she says. “Fresco is intense; you have to work fast, embedding pigment into mortar. Oil allows a first-stroke approach, but unlike fresco, it also enables continuous work, in layers, with erasures, over time. Each material adds nuance.” She likens this versatility to music: the same theme refracted into variations, each exposing a new emotional register.
Equally important is her openness to interpretation. “Sometimes I think a work is about one thing, and later I discover it’s about something else. For the viewer, their interpretation has legitimacy too. I don’t want a closed message; it’s a flexible thing.” This philosophy turns her canvases, drawings, and sculptures into invitations, open spaces where each visitor can step in and find a personal meaning.
Shay’s artistic journey is less a single return than an unfolding dialogue between media. After decades of observation, experimentation, and risk, she has forged a language that is intuitive, powerful, and deeply human. Painting, fresco, drawing, and sculpture intermingle in her hands, each enriching the other. The exhibition reflects both vulnerability and resilience, solitude and connection, the dark weight of fear and the luminous lift of color.
“After a long time of drawing and sculpting, I succeeded in weaving together color, line, and form,” she says. Her work embraces these intersections, a vivid testament to the visual and emotional spectrum of life.
Circling between Darkness and Light will be on view through October 18.
For more information, visit rgfineart.com/artist/noa-shay.