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.