Threatened Beauty

“These new creative works reflect this tension - the majestic beauty - the riot of color, the magnificent decoration, the meticulous craftsmanship of these arts which I so love on the one hand, and the potential for disaster and my own personal fears on the other. Interwoven in these pieces are references to ancient Persian folklore, fables and fantasies, as well as subtle and not-so-subtle acknowledgments of contemporary politics, disasters and current events.”

Artist Andi Arnovitz expresses her thoughts about the world we live in through the media of water colors and collage. Some of the works seem to be taken from the realm of dreams, while others carry an inferred warning that we could be endangering our very existence. The works are imbued with a terrible and threatening beauty. They contain a built-in paradox: fears and a sense of catastrophe, a clash of past and present, of good and evil, of peering forward and looking back – and yet they are a repository of hopes and dreams for the future.

About the artist:

Andi LaVine Arnovitz is a conceptual artist, born in the United States. She holds a BFA degree from Washington University, St. Louis, MO. She moved to Israel in 1999, and lives in Jerusalem, a city that has provided her with an endless source of artistic inspiration.

The focus of Arnovitz’s work is the tension between politics, religion, and gender, especially the suppression and silencing of women’s voices, and religious coercion. She explores and expresses these themes in different media: silk-screen, etching, artist’s books, sculpture, and installations. Arnovitz uses paper, fabrics and other materials to create “instructive” art, which at the same time issues a challenge regarding social issues that she believes demand change.

Andi Arnovitz’s art has been shown in Western and Eastern Europe, Israel, Canada and the United States. She has works in the collections of the Library of Congress, the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, and museums in the United States and Israel, and in private collections. In the U.S.A. she is represented by the Shulamit Gallery in Los Angeles, and in Jerusalem by the State of the Arts Gallery. Arnovitz is a member of the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and sits on the Board of Governors of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.

The exhibition closed on June 6, 2015.