Stilled Lives, Anat Shiftan

Stilled Lives
Anat Shiftan
February 18 – March 6, 2011

Greenwich House Pottery is pleased to present new sculpture by Anat Shiftan. Of her current series of sculptures, she writes: “this work examines the painterly traditions of the still life, [concerned with] cross-cultural influences, historic memory, the content of form and color and issues of perception and the relation of the invented image to reality.”

Born in Israel in 1955, Shiftan studied English Literature and Philosophy (BA 1980) at the Hebrew University, Ceramics at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, (1980 -1982), Eastern Michigan University (MA 1984) and at Cranbrook Academy of Art and Design, (MFA 1986). She worked at Pewabic Pottery, Detroit Michigan (1986 to 1999) as Instructor, Production Manager – Senior Designer and Director of Education. She taught at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design (1999-2002) and is currently teaching ceramics at SUNY New Paltz, NY since 2003 where she is head of the Ceramics Program.

Shiftan has twice received the Michigan Grant for Individual Artists and exhibited her work extensively. Shiftan has collaboratively organized: Contemporary Issues in Clay: A British Perspective, (2006) and Why Clay (2008), and organized Beyond Hand Made (2008), all symposiums examined theoretical, social and economical trends that are the context in which creative practice in visual arts occurs today. Shiftan’s own work in clay explores the subject of ambivalence in floral and zoological imagery and the representation of nature in art. Her printed images reflect on the dialectic relations between man and nature, focusing on the ambivalence reflected in the heroic yet destructive aspect of human intervention in nature, nature’s response, and the glorification of both.