Shoshana Dentz

ARTIST STATEMENT

Everything in my paintings is directly observed from a reality I construct and set up on my studio table. An ongoing series, "within without" includes over 100 works, each made from the setup I’ve been re-arranging, staring at and painting since 2010: a thin-plastic, transparent, scotch-taped-together box placed among mirrors. I angle the setup’s reflective surfaces and funnel daylight - a volume materializes, becomes held within my box. Building a painting over months, I track every detail of this self-contained world. From the moment I start, everything is wrong. Translucent, refractive planes confuse surface from depth. Edges and forms jostle in the conflicting spatial truths each eye sends to my brain. I am enchanted with these perceptual rivalries, with the dynamically-subjective reality I witness as my painting grows. My goal is not mimetic realism; rather to hyper-attentively trace the continuous, elastic “becoming” that the phenomenal world unveils from deep inside perception.

Shoshana Dentz_within without flying buttress_oil on canvas_2022_ 16 x 12inches

BIO

Shoshana Dentz (1968, NYC) is a Brooklyn-based artist. Her small, seemingly abstract works are based on meticulously faithful, close-up observation of a transparent, scotch-taped-together box that she poses with mirrors. Conceived and constructed by the artist, this barely-there still-life has been the singular and serial subject of her painting and drawing practice of the past decade. Chasing to grasp every ephemeral reflection bounding through the microworld setup on her studio table, her paintings are meditations on the workings and instability of perception itself. Dentz earned her MFA from Bard College (2004) and BFA from Brandeis University (1989). She is the recipient of awards from Pollack Krasner Foundation, NYFA, Lower Eastside Printshop and The FID Drawing Prize. Residencies include Art Omi, (2005,2020), Siena Art Institute, Italy and Interlude Residency (both 2021). She recently completed a public, site-specific installation for Art-in-Buildings in New York. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Rose Art Museum, The Graduate Center NY, MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, Rubin Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum, Pera Museum Istanbul, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Center for the Arts Wesleyan University, Kohler Arts Center, Spertus Museum Chicago and a host of private galleries. She currently teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons The New School and NYU.

www.shoshanadentz.com