Fatma Shanan’s work resonates with personal, familial, historical, cultural, and religious memories. Influenced by the 19th and 20th-century European traditions of realistic painting, Shanan strives to deconstruct firm definitions concerning painting as well as gender and national and ethnic identities and to suggest more fluid definitions that can flow through different realms. Her works are characterized by a theatrical and enigmatic view on scenes, whose participants belong to the various circles of her life, especially surrounding Julis, the Druze village where she was born and raised. ” My work strives to deconstruct firm definitions concerning painting as well as gender and national and ethnic identities and to suggest more fluid, even hybrid, definitions that can flow through different realms. Some of these issues are expressed in works in which the craft of painting seems to have been interrupted and the completeness expressed in this cessation, in the sense of standing at a threshold, is revealed, through the unfinished yet finished painting. This quiet, measured transition has an additional property that finds expression in the open atmosphere of the painting, in which the construction of the image is paired with the colorful deconstruction of the density of the preparatory photographs she uses. The viewer discovers this imagery slowly and incrementally, as it lures them to linger and spend much more time in front of the painting than they initially intended.”
Upcoming shows include: 2018 Andrea Meislin gallery. NYCl MUZEUL DE ARTĂ CLUJ-NAPOCA Museum, Roumania TBA). Previous Solo shows include: 2017 Fatma Shanan: Works 2010-2017, The 2016 Haim Shiff Prize, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art; 2015, A Single Continuum, The Um el-Fahem Art Gallery; 2014, Carpet-Place, Zemack Gallery, Tel Aviv; 2011 , Crimson, The Contemporary Art Gallery at the Memorial, Tivon. Recent Group shows include: 2017, Nonfinito, Artport gallery. Tel – Aviv; Repositioning: Old Objects, New Artworks, The Islamic Museum, Jerusalem; From a village you are and to a village you will return, The Janco Dada Museum; Ein Hod ; 2016Territory-Textile-Text, Mana Contemporary, The MECA Gallery, Jersey City, NJ, USA; Agropolis, The Science Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, curator: Maayan Shelef
In 2017, Shanan was invited to participate in the Peleh Fund Residency in California and was artist in residency in 2016 at Artport, Tel Aviv. Awards and scholarships include a 2018 Artist in residency grant from Artis; 2017 The Ministry of culture award for the young artist Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art, Tel Aviv Museum of Art ; ‘Artis’ project grant The Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts’ Grant, Tel Aviv. She has also received support from The Pais Culture Council, The Tali Cohen Garbuz, The Contemporary Art Gallery at the Memorial Center, and The America-Israel Cultural Foundation.
