EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Keren Anavy
Keren Anavy is a multidisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video 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 on gardens and water as central artistic themes through which she explores the structuring of cultural spaces and their liminal borders. The garden represents cultivated, organized nature and systems of control, while bodies of water, such as oceans and rivers, represent wildness, movement, and freedom. Anavy’s installations invite the viewer to reflect on the history of waterways and reconsider their immediate environment in our rapidly changing world.
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.
