Beverly Barkat / Artist

Beverly Barkat was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1966. Moved to Israel with her family in 1976 where she graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Barkat continued her studies at the Jerusalem Studio School under the direction of Israel Hershberg. Her early works were largely figurative and in keeping with traditional Western genres. Around 2009, she made a turn towards formal abstraction.

In 2014, her series of paintings inspired by Japanese calligraphy earned her the Curator’s Award at the 28th International Exhibition of Art in Kyoto, Japan. Since 2017 she created several large-scale site-specific works for international venues. Her first international solo exhibition, Evocative Surfaces, was shown at Museum Grimani in Venice during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. In 2018 she exhibited After the Tribes at Museum Boncompagni in Rome, where she used an experimental medium of painting complemented by a metal sculpture to explore the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Since 2019 her works have been regularly shown in the Far East, most notably in Taiwan. In 2022 Barkat held two major exhibitions in Israel, Earth Poetica at The Gottesman Aquarium and Galloping, a solo exhibition of oil paintings and drawings, at The Rothschild Gallery.

With critically acclaimed Earth Poetica, exhibited at 3 WTC in lower Manhattan in New York city , the artist experiments with innovative medium, a combination of organic bamboo and plastic waste, marking further departure from the artistic conventions and addressing the urgent problem of global plastic pollution.

Barkat’s work has been placed in various private and public collections.  Three of her artworks from the series Evocative Surfaces are exhibited permanently and are part of the art collection of Museum Grimani in Venice.