Artist : Shiri Mordechay
Title : Untitled (1)
Medium : watercolour on paper
Dimensions : 36 x 28 cm


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Shiri Mordechay’s extraordinary painted works have a cinematic quality, where expansive imagery seemingly passes through time and space, like fleeting scenes in a film or interconnected snippets of dream. Both 2D and 3D painted installation works are made piece by piece, where a narrative unfolds, like a trail of instinct. Imagery seems to arrive with fluidity, through the artist as conduit, moving within an unguarded realm, seemingly free of structured morality or logical confine, conjuring what Julia Kristeva calls an “oceanic feeling”. Mordechay’s form of ambiguous realism is revealed through an intuitive rendering of unmediated internal psychology or event, which through her translation offers up a wider metaphysical and perhaps spiritual context. She attains a preservation of the enigma of the unconscious, where constructed ego is eroded or absorbed into something more widely connected, not necessarily at one with beauty, yet seductive none the less, like a forbidden fruit promising to lure us towards darkness or light. As expressed by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mordechay paints an inner and outer world where nature is “red in tooth and claw”. Acclaimed American art critic Jerry Saltz wrote “Shiri Mordechay gives us a topsy-turvy world of mundane and mad images... It’s Charles Adams meets Edgar Allen Poe meets Animal Planet. Mordechay never allows us to look at any one thing; chaos and tumult reign.”

Mordechay was born in Israel and raised in Nigeria. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York, where she now lives and works. In 2013, he was named as one of “25 Artists to Watch & Collect” by Artvoices Magazine. Solo exhibitions have occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Italy.