Nitzan Mintz is a visual poet from Tel-Aviv based in New York. She began working over a decade ago in the streets of Tel Aviv, where she would create visual poetry for specific locations in the city.
In her early works, the main objective was rather poetic than artistic. The urban environment allowed a far greater exposure than any niche gallery or esoteric poetry magazine. The medium — graffiti, street art — served merely as a means, aimed at increasing the reach of the poem and exposing it to a broader audience.
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The first poems, were long and obtained somewhat of a verbal complexity. Consequently, the primary goal of the craft-making was, first and foremost, readability and legibility— the ability to delve deeply into the words, what is referred to as "content is king."
"The textual imagery is created with stencils that function as actors. They have a dreary outline that is purposely sourced from municipal signs and obituary notices. The shapes of the letters are decontextualized. Introduced in a new composition, they become an element in the final image."
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| Common Hebrew stencil |
Over time, Nitzan expanded her range of artistic expression and began to "play" with various typographic tools at her disposal, experimenting with different fonts (at times, she even "sculpts" her own geometric lettering) and reducing the leading to the point of compromising the text's readability. This approach, of challenging the viewer's reading ability, adds a new layer of enigma to the text. Whereas before it was immediately recognizable as a "poem" or "words," the elimination of spacing transforms the text into a kind of tangled spider web/.
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| The Eye is Closed Acrylic on metal, Tel Aviv, Israel, 2019 The eye is closed from the outside and inside" ".No one in the house |
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| Some Wounds Have a Stairwell Inside Wall painting, Dead Sea, Israel, 2019 |
As her International career took off, the demand for works in diverse languages grew, mostly in English. As a result, Nitzan began translating her works, sometimes creating a site-specific piece in the original language, while enlisting translators as needed.
My Disappearance Wall painting, Munich, Germany, 2017
Within time the experimenting extended beyond the layout and Nitzan has expanded her technique to various materials and surfaces, other than the classic wall-stencils. Her poems are later developed into her visual pieces, where she mainly uses leftovers from the public sphere, industrial materials and paint.
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| The Heart Pushes Roofs to the Sun Wood and wall paper installation, Tel Aviv, 2020 |
She later continued to create studio pieces, existing alongside the outdoors murals in an ongoing symbiosis. The emphasis in these works was on creating multi-layered pieces, with bold materiality and tactility, while the content component gradually fades, to the point of being barely-readable. The abstract text is accompanied by additional abstract elements, which together create an enigmatic piece that demands deciphering. These pieces allow a deeper look inwards, into the vague and raw place where the words are undermined.
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| The Heart mixed media, 200x40 cm, 2023 |
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| The Eye Mixed media on paper, 2022, 79x65 cm |
These are, later to be described as "collages of words and materials":
"The majority of the pieces are made of leftovers: pieces of wood, metal plates, different types of paper, construction remains, all of them no longer serve their original purpose. All of them carry stories from their past. Through these stories and what I might add to them, I can reveal something personal of my own."
As of the moment of writing this piece, Nitzan's latest public creation is located in Lisbon, on Rua da Judiaria, made along side with her partner Dede
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| Rua da Judiaria, Lisbon, 2024 |
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