born in Israel, 1951
lives and works in Tel Aviv

As the motto of his seminal article "The Readymade and the Tube of Paint" (1996), Thierry de Duve cited the words of Tintoretto, the distinguished Venetian painter, from 1548: "The finest colors can be bought readymade at the Rialto." de Duve forces us to think about the paint tube in terms of industrialization and mass production, and places Duchamp's readymade process in the context of painting, and not necessarily sculpture.

Duchamp's insight that modern art is pervaded with a commodity dimension is present in the latest works of Michal Naaman. She juxtaposes her familiar technique - layers of masking tape that bury colorful checkered paintings below it - with photographs of paint tubes. "An insult to the concept of style," Naaman says about her technique, which is typical of the "Lord of Colors" series she began in 1997, which addresses the visual and linguistic appearance of colors. The texts of the paintings (which are forever readymade in themselves) include the catalogue name of colors, such as Prussian Blue and German Earth, the name of the oil paint manufacturer Williamsburg, including the catalogue number of the paint, and names of places that refer to the biography of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The commercial names establish the colors as brands, and also bestow upon them an embarrassing combination of romance and nationalism.

The masking tape itself is an industrial material that is generally used to help create geometric abstract paintings, and thus serves as an instrument of modernist painting. Above the scaffolding of masking tape, which represents a Mondrianic universe, Naaman splashes Pollockian drips of paint (readymade painting) and blotches of paint made with nail polish.