ABOUT

Represented By

Agora Gallery, Chelsea, NY

Morpeth Contemporary, Hopewell, NJ

PennMedicine, Princeton Health, Princeton, NJ

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Shatzky’s art is in many private collections in the US and around the world. 

Commissioning art upon request.

Born and trained in Israel, Ifat Shatzky reached her maturity as an artist after moving to the United States in 1998. Shatzky’s medium of choice is painting with oil on gessoed wood panels. Sometimes she incorporates different media and collage techniques in her artwork, which may include wax, wire, oil pastel, charcoal, ink and acrylic crayons.

At this time, Shatzky’s work falls into three categories: landscapes, mixed media abstractions, and abstract organics. However, all of Shatzky’s artwork occurs at the intersection of abstraction and figuration. Nature is the source for all three categories of the artist’s work, which is then stretched in different directions.

Shatzky’s landscapes begin with photographs as a touchpoint. In a manner similar to Gerhard Richter, whose work is cited as an influence, Shatzky uses her brushwork to blur and blend the arrangement of flat planes which describe the landscape, or seascape, which is often the case.

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The mixed-media abstractions are more playful in nature and bear a stronger relation to the graphic work from Shatzky’s early career. Patterned grids of simple shapes and bright colors are articulated by the inclusion of non-painted media, such as teabags, thread, sand and sandpaper, raffia, and printed text.

Lastly, Shatzky’s abstract organics echo the discoveries of mid-20th Century American action painters including Robert
Rauschenberg, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, for whom evidence of the physical act of painting is an essential
part of the finished work. These abstract organics are also the most iconographically complex works in Shatzky’s oeuvre. Here is where mark making plays a significant role.

The artist is both a woman and a mother, the imagery that appears in these very physical paintings speaks to fertility and natural processes – seed pods, reproductive organs, and the like – float or move in and out of focus in these painterly works. The artist writes, “My work is about passion and sensuality, temptation and beauty. It is also about explosion and control, intention and intuition, reason and spontaneity and the balance between randomness and order." Whether or not these themes resonate for the viewers of Shatzky’s work, the visual journey is an engaging one and open to many satisfying experiences.