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 are disconnected from their previous political and social context, and as a result, transformed into an abstracted visual imagery that addresses distress and beauty. She creates forms that reflect on the boundary between concrete and abstract. Anavy deals with the medium of painting, and the transformation of a painting into a sculptural and architectural element in space.
BIO
Keren Anavy is a New York based multidisciplinary visual artist, working in drawing, painting, installation and performance. She is an Artist Member at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts- EFA Studio Program. Born in Israel and moved to New York in late 2015, her art is about the dynamic relationships between nature, culture and site. An extensive chapter about her work in the context of Transnational Landscapes was recently published in an Anthology by Bloomsbury Publishing, UK (2023).
Anavy has exhibited widely in solo and two person exhibitions including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Art in Quere’taro, Mexico; the Sunroom Project-Space, 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 two person collaborations were shown at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York; Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church, New York City and at the Queens Museum, New York among many other venues.
Her two person exhibitions include SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York; Autonomous University of Hidalgo State, Pachuca, Mexico; The Gallery of the Cultural Institute Mexico-Israel, Mexico City among others. The artist book The Nature of Things celebrated eight years of her ongoing collaboration with the sculpture Tal Frank and was launched at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair 2019 at MoMA PS1, followed by projection on Times Square Billboards by ZAZ10TS New York.
Group exhibitions include Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; Heaven Gallery, Chicago; Walsh Gallery NJ; Neumeraki Projects, New York; Pratt Institute, New York; Flux Factory, 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 was a Guild House Artist in Residence at Guild Hall of East Hampton, New York; Further on Artist in Residence (FoAIR), Amagansett, New York and an Artist in Residence at Marble House Project, Dorset, Vermont (2021). Anavy is an AIRIE Fellow, Everglades, National Park, Florida (2018). Residencies include Wassaic Project, Wassaic, New York (2019); The Studios at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts (2019); The New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation (2015-16) among others. She participated as a Mentor at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), IAP, 2020, and was a Mentee fellow in 2017.
Anavy received her MFA from Haifa University, Israel, and her BA in Art History from Tel Aviv University, 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 10 years, often working closely with the community. She is 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).