In Domestic Nature, painter Ofra Ohana offers an intimate reflection on the ordinary everyday scenes—rendering the quiet, often overlooked rhythms of domestic life with poetic sensitivity and painterly confidence. Born in Israel in 1984 and now based in Berlin, Ohana’s artistic journey has been shaped by displacement, motherhood, and a sustained commitment to the act of painting.

Educated in Israel (B.Ed.F.A, 2012) and later at the HGB Leipzig, where she completed her Meisterschülerin studies with the support of a DAAD exchange scholarship (2017–2021), Ohana has developed a distinctive visual language. Her paintings explore the tension between figuration and abstraction, using vibrant color and expressive, playful brush work to portray the small, intimate moments of her immediate surroundings—interiors, objects, gestures of daily life.

Since relocating to Berlin in 2022—just one week before the birth of her son—Ohana’s work has become increasingly anchored in the emotional landscape of home. Through the depiction of her domestic story, she seeks to capture the inherent beauty in the banality of her surroundings, insisting on the enduring power of painting to transform the commonplace into the extraordinary.

The painting Domestic Nature, which gives the exhibition its name, depicts a play scene in which toy animal figures are staged as a safari setting. Among the flowerpots, a leopard lurks for an antelope, and the entire scene is watched by the awed eyes of a child. This moment captures the layered meaning of Domestic Nature: the blending of a mother’s intimate, everyday reality with the imaginative world of a child at play. The domestic setting—filled with pets, potted plants, and familiar objects—becomes a stage for transformation, where ordinary surroundings take on narrative and emotional depth. Ohana’s paintings reflect both the quiet routines of home and the wild, inner landscapes that emerge within them.