ARTIST STATEMENT
Keren Anavy is a multidisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, installation and performance. Anavy’s interdisciplinary process and research-based practice scrutinize issues of the dynamic relationships between nature, culture and site. She sees landscape as a metaphor for political and personal narratives, her interest is how nature can function as a cultural agent in different societies.
Challenging the boundaries of painting and drawing often as a form of installation, her paintings are the point of departure for large scale site-specific installations and, or performance that operate on an architectural scale. In some she engages movement by creating paintings that function as video and, or dance performance, offering a platform for questioning our environments. Anavy seeks to undo the dense capsule of landscape-place-environment from
a different angle each time. Her settings examine broader social contexts through a diversity of imagery, materials and architecture.
Anavy’s research-based practice draws from gardens and water as major artistic themes through which she explores the structuring of different cultural spaces and their liminal borders. The Garden, a repeating element in her work, is a symbol for cultivated nature and control, while water channels, such as oceans and rivers, represent wildness, movement, and freedom. Anavy’s installations address our experience with the natural world; inviting the viewer to reflect on the history of waterways and reconsider their immediate environment in our rapidly changing world.
In her work process she questions the spiritual and social significance that different forms around us hold, including shapes from nature, architecture and everyday life. By using various techniques and materials, including oil painting, ink drawing, laser cutouts and print. Anavy’s works often contains charged imagery and subject matter that she disconnected from their previous political and social context, and creates forms that reflect on the boundary between concrete and abstract and as a result, transformed into an abstracted visual imagery that addresses distress and beauty.
The core of Anavy’s work lies in the medium of painting, which has evolved through abstraction over the past decade, alongside her process of transforming painting into a sculptural and architectural element within space. Her practice riffs on the built environmental spaces through fragmentation, which have developed around transcultural ideas of belonging, land and memory.
BIO
Keren Anavy is a New York based multidisciplinary visual artist, working in drawing, painting, installation, performance and video. She questions the dynamic relationships between nature, culture and sites. Anavy’s work has been discussed extensively in these contexts in a recent publication: Keren Anavy’s Garden of Living Images: Transnational Landscapes as Spaces of Ecological Order, in the Anthology: Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, UK.
Anavy has exhibited widely in solo and two person exhibitions including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Art in Quere’taro, Mexico; Wave Hill, Bronx, New York; ZAZ10TS Gallery and Billboards, Times Square, New York; and The Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Haifa Museum of Art, both in Israel. Her interdisciplinary works and or collaborations were shown at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York; Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church, New York City, Queens Museum, New York, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York; BioBAT Art Space, Brooklyn New York, Autonomous University of Hidalgo State, Pachuca, Mexico; The Gallery of the Cultural Institute Mexico-Israel, Mexico City, Monira Foundation, Jersey City, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA) New York; Heaven Gallery, Chicago; Walsh Gallery NJ; Pratt Institute, New York; The Korean Cultural Center, New York; NARS Foundation Gallery, New York; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel and The 2nd International Biennale of Painting and Sculpture, Split, Croatia among others.
Anavy is a recipient of the Asylum Arts, New York Grant. She awarded with Artist-in-Residencies Fellowships Programs at Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York; Further on Artist in Residence (FoAIR), Amagansett, New York, I-Park Foundation Fellow, Connecticut, EFA North Fork Residency in partnership with The Potato Farm Project, New York, Uncommon Art Residency, Greenport New York, Marble House Project, Vermont, AIRIE Fellow, Everglades, National Park, Florida, Wassaic Project, Wassaic, New York, The Studios at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts; International A.I.R at The New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation. Anavy participated as a Mentor at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), IAP, and was a Mentee fellow in the program.
Anavy graduated with an MFA from Haifa University, and a BA in Art History from Tel Aviv University, both in Israel. She graduated at Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl College, Israel and has an Art teaching certificate. She has been a college level educator for over ten years, often working closely with the community. Anavy was a long-term Guest Artist for SAF’s educational community project at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York. She was the Director of The International Cultural Exchange Program at Radio28, an artists-run International Studio & Residency Program located in Mexico City, and she wrote about art and culture in New York and North America at Basis for art and culture Magazine (Hebrew).
Book
New publication: Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts by Bloomsbury Publishing. The book features an extensive chapter about Anavy’s work “Keren Anavy’s Garden of Living Images: Transnational Landscapes as Spaces of Ecological Order”, by Aliza Edelman Ph.D. and Ketzia Alon Ph.D. Anavy’s work is also featured on the book’s cover.