Nearly two decades after making aliyah from the Netherlands, artist Bianca Severijns is exploring questions of home, memory and belonging in a new exhibition opening in Tel Aviv.
“Layered Memories,” which opens Nov. 19 at Tel Aviv Port’s Wertheimer Gallery, brings together Severijns’s paper wall works, reliefs and sculptural objects inspired by the landscapes of both the Netherlands and Israel.
Severijns made aliyah in 2007 with her Israeli partner and their three daughters. The move brought her into a world of landscapes, culture and a pace of life very different from those she had known growing up in the Netherlands.
The move prompted questions that would become increasingly important to her work: How does someone put down roots in a new country? What creates a sense of home? And what remains of the country where a person grew up after building a life somewhere else?
Although Israel is now where Severijns lives and works, the Netherlands remains present in her memories and artistic language, creating a dialogue between the country she left and the one in which she chose to build her future.
Curated by Nathalie Wertheimer, “Layered Memories” brings those two worlds together.
Rooted in Israel
For Severijns, the process of becoming rooted in Israel did not mean erasing the landscape of her childhood.
The works in the exhibition combine the greens and browns of the Dutch lowlands and memories of the flower and bulb fields where she worked as a young woman with the mineral colors and geological layers of the Israeli desert.
Grass moving in the wind, ripples on water, the textures of soil and expanses of flowering fields are transformed into abstract compositions reflecting erosion, growth and renewal.
The contrasts are striking. The flat, green and water-rich landscape of the Netherlands meets the drier, rockier terrain of Israel. But rather than treating them as two separate worlds, Severijns allows them to overlap.
Memories of warmth, color and childhood innocence coexist with more complicated emotions. Fear, happiness and gratitude can occupy the same space, just as memories of one country can remain alive while a person develops a deep attachment to another.
In that sense, the exhibition is not simply about looking back. It is also about what happens after a person arrives somewhere new and begins the gradual process of making it home.
The experience of aliyah
Severijns’s exploration of migration and belonging grew initially from her own decision to move to Israel but expanded as she encountered other Israelis whose journeys were very different from hers.
Getting to know people who had arrived in the country from different places and under different circumstances broadened her interest in what it means to leave one home and establish another.
Her story reflects an experience familiar to many immigrants to Israel: developing a sense of belonging in a new country without severing the emotional connection to the one left behind. Over time, relationships are formed, landscapes become familiar and experiences that once felt foreign become part of everyday life.
“Layered Memories” examines that process of accumulation—the way places, people and experiences can gradually become layers of identity.
For Severijns, the idea is reflected not only in the subject matter of her art but also in the way the works themselves are constructed.
Building with paper
A sheet of paper in Severijns’s hands becomes something closer to a sculptural material.
Using a technique of her own invention, Severijns paints sheets of paper, tears them by hand and assembles the fragments into intricate compositions. The process can involve hundreds or even thousands of individual acts of joining and layering.
Each piece of torn paper has its own irregular contour. Changes in color, direction and placement build volume and create rhythm and movement across the work.
The finished surfaces can evoke fabric, tree bark, sediment or layers of earth.
The labor-intensive process also mirrors some of the exhibition’s central ideas. Individual fragments are brought together to create something new without completely losing their separate forms.
Layer upon layer, the works take shape in much the same way memories accumulate over a lifetime.
The physical qualities of the paper allow Severijns to move between two- and three-dimensional art. Some pieces remain close to the wall, while others project outward, creating reliefs and sculptural forms that change according to the viewer’s position and the surrounding light.
The natural world remains an important reference throughout.
Patterns resembling windblown grass or moving water sit alongside surfaces suggestive of rock, soil or geological strata. The imagery is abstract, but its origins in landscapes both remembered and experienced are evident.
Exhibitions in Israel and abroad
Severijns’s paper works have previously been exhibited internationally, including at the Shanghai Paper Biennial, the Gustav-Lübcke Museum in Germany and the International Paper Biennial in Haacht, Belgium.
In Israel, her work has been exhibited at the Tel Aviv Biennales of Crafts and Design at MUZA, Eretz Israel Museum.
Her works are also held in private collections around the world and in the collection of the Gustav-Lübcke Museum.
The Tel Aviv exhibition brings her artistic journey back to the personal experience that helped shape it: the decision to leave the Netherlands, make aliyah and build a home in Israel.
Almost two decades after making aliyah, the Netherlands and Israel no longer appear in Severijns’s work simply as the country she left and the one where she arrived.
Instead, they coexist—layered, like the fragments of paper from which she constructs her art.
“Layered Memories” opens at the Wertheimer Gallery, 8 Kikar Plumer, Building 36, Tel Aviv Port, on Nov. 19 at 6:30 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through Jan. 15, 2027. Admission is free.
