MAGAZINE
What Remains When Beauty Fades. A Conversation with Edit Ben Gida
What happens when beauty becomes both a promise and a trap?
In her solo exhibition Beauty is Deceptive at Corridor Gallery, artist Edit Ben Gida turns to feminine archetypes shaped by mythology, art history, cultural memory, and imagination. Her figures are not portraits, but images of women as culture has created them: adorned, idealized, feared, desired, and preserved.
Through gold, flowers, insects, layered textures, and references to Renaissance painting, Edit Ben Gida explores the fragile tension between beauty and time, attraction and danger, ornament and preservation — asking what remains when beauty begins to fade.
Edit, are your figures women or images created by culture?
The figures are not portraits of specific women, but feminine archetypes formed through layers of cultural memory, mythology, art history, and imagination. They are women, but they are also images of women — as culture has looked at them, shaped them, adorned them, feared them, and turned them into ideals throughout history.
Much of my visual language draws on Renaissance painting, where the female figure often appears as an object of beauty, sanctity, temptation, purity, or tragedy. I am interested in this tension: between a woman’s inner identity and the external image that culture constructs around her. The figures in my paintings exist somewhere between a living presence and a cultural projection. They carry beauty, but also the full weight of what that beauty has come to signify.
Are the insects and flowers decoration or preservation?
They are all of these things at once. On the one hand, the insects, gold, flowers, and dense textures function as ornament. They recall jewelry, crowns, embroidery, decorative details, and luxury objects. On the other hand, they also evoke relics, fossils, natural specimens, and materials preserved in time — like insects suspended in amber.
I think of these elements as creating an almost ritualistic space around the figures. They beautify the image, but they also freeze it. Beauty becomes a form of preservation, an attempt to hold on to something that is, by nature, temporary: youth, vitality, attraction, presence, a particular moment in time.
There is something both seductive and tragic in this gesture. The ornament is not merely ornament. It is also an attempt to resist disappearance. The gold, the flowers, and the insects all point to the same desire: to stop time, to preserve beauty, to turn the fleeting into something eternal.
Can painting stop time?
Painting always contains an attempt to stop time. It captures a face, a gesture, a fleeting moment, and gives them duration. But in my work, this attempt is never complete. The paintings also reveal the impossibility of stopping time. The flowers, insects, organic forms, and layered textures carry associations of growth, decay, change, renewal, and decomposition.
The works therefore do not try to defeat time. Rather, they try to hold the contradiction: on the one hand, the human desire to preserve beauty; on the other, the knowledge that everything changes. I am interested in that fragile moment before something slips away, or the moment in which beauty begins to turn into memory.
In this sense, the paintings also examine the evolution of the beauty ideal itself. What do we preserve? What do we decide is beautiful? Which images survive from one generation to the next, and how do they continue to shape the way we look at women today?
Why do figures like Medusa still matter today?
These figures interest me because they reveal how deeply Western culture has repeatedly linked female beauty with danger, temptation, sacrifice, madness, or tragedy. Medusa, Ophelia, and the Siren are all powerful images, but their power is complex. They are both admired and feared at the same time. Their beauty is never innocent; it is always bound up with danger, with a wound, or with catastrophe.
I am drawn to these figures because they bring to the surface something deeply embedded in the cultural imagination. They show how female presence has often been turned into a story of desire and punishment, attraction and danger, enchantment and control. In literature and art, women like these became symbols — but symbols that were usually created through the gaze of others.
In my work, I want to return to these figures and ask whether the very images that were meant to define beauty also shaped the boundaries placed on women. Are those powerful mythological and literary figures part of what determined for us what is considered beautiful? And what happens when I paint them again, from my own perspective, allowing them to carry not only beauty, but also complexity, power, and ambiguity?
Is Beauty is Deceptive about beauty or its illusion?
The exhibition does not reject beauty or dismiss its power. On the contrary, it uses beauty consciously. I am interested in beauty precisely because it has power — because it draws the gaze, generates emotion, awakens memory, and creates a sense of transcendence or longing.
At the same time, Beauty is Deceptive seeks to examine the paradox of beauty. Beauty is temporary, fragile, and fleeting, yet it carries enormous emotional and cultural force. It can define status, desire, value, and identity. It can be a promise, but also a trap.
This is therefore not only a critique of beauty ideals, although that critique is certainly present. It is also an acknowledgment that beauty acts upon us. It has a real hold on us. I am interested in that tension: the pleasure of beauty, the violence of beauty, the desire to preserve it, and the grief that appears when we understand that it cannot be held forever.
What remains when beauty fades?
This is perhaps the central question of the exhibition. When external enchantment dissolves, what remains are memory, story, material, and the traces time leaves behind. The works look at these traces not only as signs of loss, but as a space in which transformation can take place.
Beauty can only be preserved up to a certain point, and this is part of what makes human existence so tragic. We try to hold on to a face, a body, a moment, an image of ourselves — but time continues to act upon everything. The surface changes. The flower withers. The body ages. The image becomes memory.
And yet, something remains. Perhaps not the ideal of beauty itself, but the human presence behind it: vulnerability, longing, experience, identity, and the story carried by the body and by the image. For me, this is where the deeper preservation takes place. Beauty may fade, but humanity can remain.
The solo exhibition of Edit Ben Gida Beauty is Deceptive at Corridor Contemporary, will be on view until July 14 at 39 Shabazi Street, Tel Aviv.
