Spiral Shells | Textured Coastal Contemporary Painting, 2024

Olga Ben Zur  

Olga Ben Zur is a contemporary Israeli artist whose practice explores memory, emotional reflection, and the quiet transformative power of everyday objects. Born in the USSR, she has lived and worked in Israel since 1996.

For Olga Ben Zur, painting functions as a portal into the unknown—a process of self-analysis shaped by personal history, observation, and emotional experience. Since beginning her formal artistic studies in 2017, she has developed a visual language grounded in texture, tactility, and contemplative minimalism, receiving a diploma in contemporary art in 2025.

Working with oil, acrylic, and textured paste on medium-sized canvases, Olga combines brushwork with palette knife techniques to create richly tactile surfaces. Her paintings focus on natural elements such as stones, shells, flowers, and leaves, exploring their material presence and emotional resonance. Through impasto textures and restrained compositions, she seeks to convey not only the appearance of an object, but its “memory," vibration, and inner life.

A central body of work in her practice is the series Harmony of Small Things, where simple natural forms become tools for psychological grounding and reflection. Influenced by metamodern philosophy and the ideas of Korean artist Lee Ufan, Olga examines the oscillation between inner and outer realities, presence and memory, stillness and transformation.

Poetry also plays an important role in her artistic universe. In 2021, her texts were included in the collection Poetry of Flowers, published in Russia as part of an international collaboration between artists and poets.

Since 2021, Olga Ben Zur has participated in international exhibitions and competitions in Israel, Russia, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. She is a member of the Eurasian Union of Artists and the Union of Sculptors and Artists of Israel. Her works are held in private collections in Israel, the United States, England, and Russia.

Through texture, natural forms, and quiet observation, Olga Ben Zur creates paintings that invite viewers into spaces of emotional stillness, tactile memory, and inner balance.