ANDI ARNOVITZ
WORLD-RENOWNED MULTI-MEDIA CONCEPTUAL ARTIST
Andi Arnovitz is a conceptual artist living and working in Jerusalem, Israel. Her work is in the permanent collections of the United States Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Museum, the Israel National library, Yale University Library, the Magnes Collection, the Yeshiva University Museum, the Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv, the Ein Harod Museum of Art, and the Gottesman Israel National Aquarium. She has exhibited her pieces all over the world.
Her artistic practice focuses on the flashpoints where gender, religion, and politics meet and hinder personal agency. Her art has explored issues of domestic violence, reproductive freedom, abuses of power where church and state are entwined, and nuclear proliferation. Currently, she is focusing on problems of climate change, displaced populations, and the impact of Covid on women.
Her art highlights these places of friction, the territory where things are not all black and white and where we, as human beings, have the potential to create change or to find common ground. Her work examines symbols, images, and archetypes that transcend tightly defined definitions and create a broad human platform for shared experiences.
Arnovitz works in a variety of media, with fabrics, printmaking processes, paper, and porcelain. As a conceptual artist, she often uses printmaking and digital information to create print series, artist books, and large-scale installations. Much of her artistic practice is focused on creating statements through the use of multiples: thousands of prayers, thousands of paper scrolls, thousands of rods of clay, thousands of pieces of paper, hundreds of pieces of resin or porcelain, all painstakingly assembled.
Arnovitz’s work has been exhibited all over the world, including solo and group shows in England, China, the United States, Israel, Spain, Poland, Germany, Finland, France, Lithuania, Canada, Italy, Mallorca, and Bulgaria. Her work is in private collections in both the United States and in Europe, as well as universities, museums, and institutions.
When God and Art Meet
ANDI ARNOVITZ
Immersing oneself deeply, deliberately in a work of art is one of the easiest ways to experience the Divine. You won’t get there by taking a casual jaunt through an art gallery or a museum. You need to take a deep dive into a specific work. Contemplate it. Search for what the artist is trying to say. Open yourself to the possibility that the artist is, through a Divine gift, giving over an idea or concept that transcends time and place. It is at this point that you also might comprehend that creativity has no logical explanation other than some perfect collision of inspiration, God, and the physical act of creating.
It is easy for any artist to say, “I made that.” But where did the inspiration and that idea come from? Most artists will tell you that their lightbulb moments have bordered on a spiritual and metaphysical epiphany. Very often they looked up and somehow the work had come into being... They cannot explain how it happened or why they made the choices they did: it is as if the work created itself, for reasons the artists themselves do not even understand. Not surprisingly, the greatest works of art express ideas, emotions, and passions, and turn them into something timeless — universal, transcendent human experiences. This creative process defies words and cannot properly be explained in a linear, cohesive way.
History has provided a constant and consistent hum of new artistic expressions – starting with stubs of charcoal on cave walls to today’s virtual reality. Very often these works of art are created using color: Cadmium red. Egyptian blue. Imperial yellow. Ultramarine. These luminous and iridescent hues have dazzled our senses and moved us deeply over the millennia. Mankind has spent millions of dollars refining the process of creating these color pigments, even closely guarding the formulas for certain blues and reds. This is because these colors come so close to what we observe and what is rare in the world.
Yet no matter how hard we try or how many algorithms we program, there will never be a color that doesn’t already exist. And man will never stop trying to reproduce what his eyes have seen. Go snorkeling in the Maldives and your only thought will be that there simply has to be a God. Who could come up with such wild and radiant colors, shapes, and sizes? I’m not even sure whether people are capable of painting or photographing these colors accurately. We all recognize that instance when we have photographed a landscape or a sunset of such exquisite colorful nuance, only to be deeply disappointed when it doesn’t come close to capturing what our eyes saw. Mankind’s constant desire to create and transmit what our eyes have seen, what our minds have imagined, is infinitely easier to explain if we just surrender to the notion that there is an artist far more talented and experienced out there than we are.