KEREN ANAVY
Floating in Three Acts
March 26 - April 30, 2026
Curatorial Advising and Exhibition Text: Catherine Bernard, PhD
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 26, 4 pm – 7 pm
Exhibition Walkthrough with the artist and the Gallery Director, Hyewon Yi, PhD:
Wednesday, April 8, 2:40 pm – 4:20 pm
Live Intervention: Performance by students of Artist Marcela Torres:
Thursday, April 30, 2:40 pm – 4:10 pm
Floating in Three Acts is a landmark solo exhibition by New York–based artist Keren Anavy that marks her most significant presentation to date in the United States. Spanning 2,500 square feet across three interconnected gallery spaces, the exhibition unfolds as an immersive, site-specific environment integrating drawing, painting, printmaking, laser cutout, sculpture, video, and sound.
Rooted in Anavy’s transnational experience as an immigrant artist, the exhibition traces a deeply personal narrative shaped by memory, identity, and nature. Created in the shadow of profound personal loss, the work reflects on fragility, creation, and the shifting boundaries between a gaze inward and outer worlds. Structured in three acts: Garden, Ocean, and Water Channels, the exhibition uses water as a central metaphor for reflection, transformation, and ecological vulnerability, guiding viewers through states of cultivation, submergence, and drift.
The Upper Entrance Gallery, The Garden, explores irrigation as a life-sustaining force and the garden as a symbol of cultural order. Inspired by the Long Island coastline and Old Westbury Gardens, the installation features groups of ink and colored pencil drawings on transparent Mylar suspended from the ceiling, accompanied by a floor installation of seven shallow, circular pools containing water and colored ink. The pools are surrounded by a mosaic composed of ink drawings on rice paper, along with custom wallpaper and laser-cutout Mylar works inspired by the garden and estate gates that blend Eastern and Western aesthetics, evoking power and hybridity.
In the Middle Gallery, The Ocean, flooding becomes both literal and psychological. Ocean Archipelago, a floor installation of twelve movable island forms composed of concrete bricks, Plexiglas, ink drawings, and coastal found materials, suggests fragility, ecological entanglement, and loss. A small installation featuring a mound of rammed earth bricks, video, sound, and scroll drawings wrapped around driftwood extend themes of impermanence and submersion.
The Lower Gallery, Water Channels, centers on floating as an in-between state bridging visibility and obscurity. A canoe filled with ultramarine pigment anchors the space, while red scroll paintings inspired by the hibiscus flower and sculptural forms composed of found shells and circular-format paintings, evoke migration, longing, and transformation.
Throughout the galleries, translucent materials shift two-dimensional imagery into sculptural presence, heightening the exhibition’s immersive atmosphere. Overall, water and garden operate as opposing yet intertwined forces- wildness and control, reflecting the delicate balance between nature’s unpredictability and human intervention.
Floating in Three Acts presents a multi-sensory environment that bridges the personal with the universal. Weaving Anavy’s intimate narrative of loss and resilience with broader reflections on identity, memory, and ecological change, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a contemplative meditation on water as both a life-giving force and an agent of transformation.
Public Programs and Collaborations
The exhibition includes a student intervention developed in collaboration with artist Marcela Torres. It also features rammed earth bricks created in partnership with the Columbia University GSAPP Natural Materials Lab, whose research advances low-carbon building materials and sustainable construction practices.
Dr. Catherine Bernard, Professor of Art History in the Department of Visual Arts, served as curatorial advisor and wrote the brochure essay for the exhibition.
Multiple public events are scheduled throughout the run of the show, including the opening reception on March 26, the exhibition walkthrough with the artist and the gallery director, Dr. Hyewon Yi on April 8, and a live performance intervention by students of Marcela Torres on April 30.
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 26, 4 pm – 7 pm
Exhibition Walkthrough with the artist and the Gallery Director, Hyewon Yi, PhD:
Wednesday, April 8, 2:40 pm – 4:20 pm
Live Intervention: Performance by students of Artist Marcela Torres:
Thursday, April 30, 2:40 pm – 4:10 pm
About Keren Anavy
Keren Anavy is a New York-based visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video and performance. Anavy’s interdisciplinary process and research-based practice scrutinize issues of the dynamic relationships between nature, culture and site. She sees landscape as a metaphor for political and personal narratives. Challenging the boundaries of painting and drawing often as a form of installation, her paintings are the point of departure for large scale site-specific installations and, or performance that operate on an architectural scale, which have developed around transcultural ideas of belonging, land and memory. Anavy’s work has been discussed extensively in these contexts in the publication Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, UK (2023).
Anavy work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Quere'taro Museum of Art, Mexico; Wave Hill, NY, Pioneer Works, NY, Danspace Project, NYC, Queens Museum, NY, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC, BioBAT Art Space, NY, Monira Foundation, NJ, Pratt Institute, NY, ZAZ10TS Gallery and Billboards, Times Square, NYC, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Artist-in-Residencies Fellowships Programs include Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY; FoAIR, Amagansett, NY; I-Park Foundation Fellow, CT; Marble House Project, VT; AIRIE, Everglades, National Park, Florida; Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; The Studios at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts; EFA North Fork Residency NY; Uncommon Art Residency, Greenport, NY; International A.I.R NARS Foundation, NY. Anavy participated as a Mentor at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), IAP, and she is a Member Artist at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (EFA), NYC.
Sponsorship
This exhibition is supported by an Artis Exhibition Grant, Artis Contemporary Art, New York, NY.