Shiri Mordechay: My Unspoiled Nature
Serious Topics is pleased to present My Unspoiled Nature, a new series of large-scale paintings by Shiri Mordechay. Known for her ephemeral watercolor drawing installations, Mordechay here turns to oil and acrylic on canvas and linen. The paintings range in scale from 7 x 17 inches to an immersive 13 feet, and teem with flora, fauna, and human figures in states of bloom and undoing.
Even the most beautiful things carry the weight of what’s been done to them. The title, My Unspoiled Nature, gestures towards an untainted state, yet the paintings expose an inner tension. Mordechay leans into that contradiction with intricate and expansive measures. The paintings radiate an alluring beauty that reveals a realm of fragmentation and decline in the looking. Pain coexists with pleasure. Baroque landscapes hold submerged figures — half hidden, half dreamt. The result is hallucinatory and sharp.
Gallery director Kristin Calabrese first encountered Shiri in 2001, when teaching an advanced drawing class at San Francisco Art Institute. Over the course of three hours, Mordechay would produce 20 feet of restless figures — war-torn, feverish, urgent. This exhibition began as a simple proposition: what if we sent you materials for a show of stretched paintings? To our delight, she accepted.
Mordechay’s iconography recalls Brueghel and Bosch for their psychic density. Symbolic worlds unfold, fracture, and recombine. Monstrosity and beauty are not opposed but fused. The result is a kind of pulchritudinous delirium—radiant, wounded, specific. Each painting feels like a private language made momentarily public.
We are in the presence of a ‘monstrose’ flowering — the result of injury and fecundity, violence and beauty grafted together. Decoration becomes defense, pulchritude a distraction from the grotesque, and every bloom seems to carry a warning. In these canvases, nature is not unspoiled — it is masked with hunger.
Shiri Mordechay was born in Israel and raised in Nigeria. She received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from School of Visual Arts in New York. Solo exhibitions have occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Italy and Ireland. Some of the galleries/shows she has exhibited in are Honor Fraser, Diane Rosentien, Plane Space & Spring Break Art Fair. In 2020 her work was featured in New American paintings juried by Jerry Saltz . Mr. Saltz has written of her work stating, “Shiri Mordechay gives us a topsy-turvy world of mundane and mad images in sprawling paintings that curl onto the floor, snake around corners, and spill into space. We see nipple rings on giant breasts, bloody roadkill, spider webs, and Gothic mansions. It’s Charles Adams meets Edgar Allen Poe meets Animal Planet. Mordechay never allows us to look at any one thing; chaos and tumult reign. One thing leads to the next in this perpetual image-imagination flow. It makes stream of consciousness into a torrent of unconsciousness.”
Mordechay describes her paintings as if the ideas arrive from outside and yet anyone with an eye for the grotesque and sardonic can spot the humor that could only be her own. Imagery seems to arrive by chance and move about within a pre-moral realm and conjure what Julia Kristeva calls an “oceanic feeling.”