Miriam Cabessa is a painter whose practice spans performance and installation art. Cabessa won the 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Israeli Ministry of Culture.
Cabessa was born in Morocco, raised in Israel, and currently works in her Williamsburg studio in New York as well as her studio in Tel Aviv.
Cabessa represented Israel at the Venice Biennale in 1997; since then, her "Slow Motion Feminine Action Painting" has been internationally recognized and exhibited in museums and galleries across the world.
Cabessa’s works are included in major collections: Jerusalem Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Haifa Museum of Modern Art, Knesset of Israel, the British Museum in London, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Texas State University, Frederick R Weisman Art foundation in Los Angeles, America University Museum in Washington DC and many more.
Miriam Cabessa has been painting since she was 6 years old, when she vowed to become a painter. Throughout her career she has abstained from using brushes and formed a unique painting language in a technique described as “human vibration”. Cabessa uses her own body as “the first tool” in which she creates the image. The rhythm of her breathing, the touch of her bare hands on the surface, using extension tools, allow her to vibrate her consciousness into her art.
Cabessa uses her studio as a search lab for magic and explores in her painting the relationship between the human and the machine, the organic and mechanical, the physical and the sublime.
Cabessa has won awards such as the New York International Studio & Curatorial Program Award, the Ministry of Science and the Arts Prize, the Nathan Gottesdiener Foundation Israeli Art Prize by Tel Aviv Museum and the Israeli Ministry of Culture Lifetime Achievement Award.