Mabon

Shiri Mordechay (b. 1974)
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.
‘Untitled (1)’
watercolour on paper, 36 x 28 cm
86