Fatma Shanan

Fatma Shanan

Symbiose von Körper und Raum

Fatma Shanan’s (b. Julis, Israel, 1986; lives and works in Julis and Tel Aviv) works bear witness to a duality between the individual and the collective. The daughter of a Druze family, she creates paintings and videos that intertwine personal memories with the historic culture and traditions of her Druze community. A distinctive mosaic-like painting technique lets Shanan create figurative pictures that seem abstract. Her works frame depictions of the female—in many instances, her own—body. Another recurring motif in her earlier work was the Oriental rug; more recently, nature has been her preferred setting. The artist’s body often appears to float in her pictures, hovering in an in-between state and invariably interwoven with its surroundings. Revisiting realist traditions in the European painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shanan seeks to deconstruct rigid ideas about the medium as well as gender roles and ethnic identities.

The artist’s first monograph presents a comprehensive cross-section of her output of the past eight years. The publication includes an essay by Kimberly Bradley.