Laura Murlender’s exhibit of paintings at Yeshiva University Museum takes its title — “From Darkness to Light” — from a harrowing personal experience. During Argentina’s “Dirty War,” Ms. Murlender, 19 years old at the time, was kidnapped by the military government, which ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. She was hooded, shackled, and kept in solitary confinement for 11 days. Her captors physically and psychologically tortured her. Then, just as suddenly as she was kidnapped, she was released on the streets of Buenos Aires, making her one of the rare “disappeared” who escaped.

The morning after her escape, she left for a kibbutz in Israel. “Jerusalem was like a whole new world was in front of me,” Ms. Murlender, a Buenos Aires native, said in an interview with The New York Sun. “I felt protected in Israel.”

Though the new home felt safe, she kept her traumatic past a secret, expressing it only through art. She studied painting and photography at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and graduated in 1982. Later, at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she studied ancient fresco techniques, giving her another approach for her multilayered pieces. Her works are a blend of her extensive formal art training, including techniques in photography, painting, collage, etching, and woodcuts.

Ms. Murlender’s paintings are giant mixed-media canvases that reflect her philosophy that an artist’s identity is shown through her art. The works display a constant struggle of the rational and irrational, and of use of color as an added symbolism to the weight of the layers.

“There is this permanent feeling of survival and awareness,” Ms. Murlender said. “My whole life I’m trying to bring in the possibility of dialogue, to try to be there with this structural tension into the work.”

The grid shape, with its rigid walls and strict geometric pattern, is a constant presence. She focuses on the rationality of form, composition, colors, and texture that connect it with the irrationality of sensation, feeling, emotion, and thought. Her paintings, divided into four series — the Black, Red, White, and Blue periods — reflect this running dialogue and struggle.

Black, the absence of color and light, was her hooded, dark period, a time she spent focusing her thoughts on survival. “Deep in Black” is nearly the size of its gallery wall, and gives an immediate sense of heaviness to Ms. Murlender’s experiences. The red represents her cry for life, and her return. The pieces are massive and bright, almost glowing on their white walls. The white period uses the summation of all colors, and thus of all the possibilities of life itself. And her blue period is her most vibrant, representing her freedom to choose any color. “The use of fields of color is related to the idea of minimalism. It’s reducing the element to its minimal color, but it’s the maximum of expression and weight,” she said.

On top of the colors are mixed materials — sheet metal, collage, physical tears in the canvas. Ms. Murlender sees each addition as having a metaphorical weight.

The piece that starts the show, “The Wall,” combines photography, oil paint, and sheet metal. To her, the wall represents stability and support and her search for identity. She creates her work as a stonemason builds a wall — stone by stone, layer by layer.

“You continue with it, through time and through memory,” Ms. Murlender said. “A wall for me is a meaning of support, of being myself in spite of what happened to me, and to have an identity in spite of the worst thing that can happen to you. That’s the core of my work.”

She relates her work to history but with a contemporary twist, as in her two pieces “Timeline I” and “Timeline II.” In them, she combines photographs of the ancient Israeli cities of Akko and Caesarea with modern techniques, creating an image on the cusp of history and modern society. The mix gives her work a dimension she feels echoes her own personal history, one she still struggles with yet uses in each piece.

The museum’s curator of contemporary arts, Reba Wulkan, said Ms. Murlender’s work represents the type of art and diversity typically displayed in the gallery.

“We were struck by the message of how she creates her art and how her art has changed her life,” Ms. Wulkan said. “Her work interprets her life and vice versa.”

Ms. Murlender only told the story to her daughters two years ago. As she sees it, she was targeted for her role in the young Jewish movement in Buenos Aires and for her family’s role in the city’s cultural life and Jewish community. Last year, she testified before a federal investigations committee and learned that she had been “released by mistake,” according to now-unclassified documents.

“It has been difficult, I couldn’t tell my story for all these years. But basically it’s that you want to be loyal to yourself,” Ms. Murlender said.

“I think over everything is my message that I am someone who believes in art [and] in life,” she said. “You can transcend through artistic creation. You have to rebuild yourself, you have to find your identity, and you can do it.”

Until October 21 (15 W. 16th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-294-8330).