Nava is an Iranian-Israeli artist based in NYC. She received numerous awards including: The Terra Foundation for American Art, The Elisabeth Greenshields Foundation Award, The Eileen Kaminsky Foundation award at MANA Contemporary and featured in New American Paintings Magazine.
Nava has exhibited both nationally and internationally in places including: The Jewish Museum of NJ, Burchfield Penney Art Museum, NY, The Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, NY, Dedee Shattuck Gallery, MA, Mana Contemporary, The Experimental Gallery, NY, Flux Factory, NY, A.I.R Gallery NY, Wilkinson Hall Gallery, NY, Panepinto Galleries, NJ, Indigo Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, Marion Art Gallery, NY, Olean Public Library Gallery, NY, NY, Gallery 33, Tel-Aviv, Israel, ISA Gallery, Italy and Stern Gallery, Israel. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art (2015), the Jerusalem Studio School (2006).
Nava’s praxis is an evolving process through which she probes themes of nonduality, impermanence, presence, alchemy, and immanence. Feet, hands, and backs as sensitive portals of energy in the body are recurring subjects in Nava’s paintings, as well as translucent skin that exposes the movement of the etheric and emotional realms within and beyond it. Informed by Buddhist, Christian, and Jewish concepts, she has created her own visual language for the tender intensity that emerges when the tactile and the spiritual coalesce.
LABA project:
A large series of (paintings and sculptures) delving into the theme of Broken Vessels incorporating different techniques including wax, resin, wood, epoxy, fur, pigment, hair extension, fabric and plaster, in life-sized sculptures and in large-scale paintings of acrylic and oil. In this working process, Nava will deconstruct the body and build it back together.
If you could break one thing, what would it be?
Break open the invisible field in us and around us that we could see and feel it clearly