Ronit Goldschmidt

Gordon Gallery is pleased to present Ronit Goldschmidt's upcoming solo show, Landscapes, at Gordon Gallery New York.

Drawing on years of movement across geographies and identities, Goldschmidt’s landscapes form a deeply personal and layered meditation on place and belonging.

Born in Namibia to a German mother and Israeli father, Goldschmidt’s relationship to land and place is intricate. Her family relocated to Israel in the early 1990s, and resided in a religious settlement near Jerusalem. As a young teen, Goldschmidt wandered in the hills surrounding the settlement, reflecting on the fences and checkpoints that dotted the landscape around her and limited access to it. As she moved away from religion, Goldschmidt, who has always known she would be a painter, began studying with Israel Hershberg, a master of figurative painting.

Her life moved through Berlin, rural Italy, and Neve Shalom, a village of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel who choose to share their lives with one another. Today, Goldschmidt lives in Haifa with her partner and daughter in her own Jewish-Palestinian family.

It was only upon returning to Israel from her years abroad that she began painting landscapes. At first, she deconstructed and reassembled landscape paintings by other artists. Later, she began to go out into the landscape herself, sketching, photographing, collecting fragments that she would later recompose in the studio. Her practice is rooted in familiarity with the locations and long, patient observation, returning to the same sites repeatedly over the years. Her subjects are always intimately tied to places she knows: the hills of her childhood in Beit Horon, dense woods in the Galilee, and the now-scorched slopes of Neve Shalom.

These are Israeli landscapes, but they refuse the conventions of either nationalist or romantic idealism. There are no people in her paintings, but they are charged with the emotional weight of personal mythologies - trees become markers of memory. Goldschmidt does not claim possession of these landscapes through the act of painting them. Rather, she seeks to consecrate specific sites - quiet pockets of land that become personal sanctuaries. These are often places she encounters alone, standing in intimate silence before a scene no one else is witnessing. “There’s no place I feel I truly belong to,” she says. “But through looking, through listening, I try to become part of the land—not by claiming it, but by being with it.”

A painter navigating questions of home, identity, and rootedness in a land that is both familiar and estranged, her work resonates with anyone who has ever stood still in a place long enough for it to reveal its contradictions and beauty.