Liya Ella
Raspberry

Liya Ella Raspberry is an Israeli contemporary painter living and working in the Western Galilee. She is self-taught — with no formal art school training, her practice has been built entirely through years of trial and error, and a constant, deliberate process of self-directed study. Her work moves between two registers: raw, physical paint handling built through layers, erasure and repetition, and a flatter, graphic visual language borrowed from pop culture and branding. Different surfaces, the same underlying impulse — critique. Her own image recurs throughout, used as subject and as material rather than as self-expression alone. She usually begins with an idea rather than an image, and lets the work find its own way through the process.

Beauty and discomfort often exist together in her work, as do tenderness and violence, presence and disappearance.

She lives surrounded by extraordinary landscapes and the constant presence of a nearby border. That contradiction — between beauty and tension, ordinary life and a reality that can change very quickly — inevitably finds its way into the work. For her, painting is physical. Material, scale and surface matter. She is less interested in making a painting look beautiful than in reaching the point where it feels right.