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 see 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 engage movement by create paintings that function as video and, or dance performance, offers 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,
In her work process she questions about the spiritual and social significances that different forms around us hold, shapes from nature, architecture or everyday life. By using various techniques and materials, including oil paintings, ink drawings, laser cutouts and print. Anavy’s works often contain charged imagery and subject matter that are disconnect 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. She deal with the medium of painting, and the transformation of a painting into a sculptural and architectural element in the space.
Her research-based practice draws from garden 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 my work, is a symbol for cultivated nature and control, while water channels, such as oceans and rivers, represent wildness, movement, and freedom. Anavy installations addresses 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.
BIO
Keren Anavy is a New York based multidisciplinary visual artist, working in drawing, painting, installation and performance. A Member Artist at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts- EFA Studio Program, New York City. 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, The Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Haifa Museum of Art, both in Israel. Her interdisciplinary works and two persons collaborations showed 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. Her artist book The Nature of Things is celebrating eight years of ongoing collaboration with the sculpture Tal Frank and was launched at Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair 2019 at MoMA PS1 and was later screened on Times Square Billboards by ZAZ10TS New York (2020).
Group exhibitions include Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, Heaven Gallery, Chicago, Walsh Gallery NJ, Neumeraki Projects, New York, The 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 collage level educator for over 10 years, often working closely with the community. She is the Director of International Cultural Exchange Program at Radio28, an artists-run International Studio & Residency Program located in Mexico City. She was an Art Writer about art and culture in New York and North America at Basis for art and culture Magazine (Hebrew).