Bio
Sarai Givaty is an Israeli artist who was born in a beautiful city by the sea of Galili in 1982 to the oldest Jewish family in Israel, the Zenaty family. For her primary and secondary education, Sarai studied at art schools. She received formal training in painting, digital photography, sculpture, drawing, music and performing art.
At the age of 17 she started traveling the world, ultimately basing herself in New York at the age of 20. In New York Givaty exhibited three group shows and one solo show. Simultaneously, she continued her education at the School of Visual Art and the Herbert Berghof Studio of Performing Art. After two and half years in New York, she returned to Israel and ended up establishing a TV career.
Now back in the States, Givaty lives between Los Angeles, New York and Israel where she continually produces fine art and informs her bilateral worldview. Determined to evolve and develop her oeuvre, she experiments with mixed media incorporating painting, photography, video art and music into her new work. Becoming perpetually more provocative and dynamic, demand for Givaty's work continues to grow worldwide.
Growing up in war torn Israel has had a powerful impact on Givaty, whose work masterfully interrogates the issues of contemporary warfare, international security, privacy and human rights. In a stunning, hyperrealist mix media series called 18, Givaty explores the beautiful but haunting vulnerability of female Israeli soldiers and the controversial notion of mandatory conscription. Her last solo show, Privacy, features luxuriantly colored images of security x-rayed luggage cradling female bodies in the fetal position. This boldly graphic yet uncannily expressive work is peppered with an amalgam of personal objects, military objects, medicinal objects, and fashion objects: all undeniable accoutrements of the late-capitalist information age. These images, so innocently magnificent yet so unsettling, appear as if even the mother's womb has been reduced to the scrutiny of international security measures. Givaty's images are radiant, Orwellian tapestries that, as Clement Greenburg once suggested, indicate that we have been desensitized by the bombardment of an alluring, plastic aesthetic. Givaty forces the viewer to consider this dichotomy between beauty and horror. Furthermore, accentuating the inextricable link between U.S. policy and the state of the Middle East, Givaty's work insinuates that the war on civil rights has gone far beyond the war torn regions of the Middle East and is now a global conflict.
EDUCATION
1999 Left Israel to travel School of Visual arts, workshop, NYC, NY
GROUP SHOWS
2002 Amsterdam Whitney Gallery, Chelsea, New York
2004 Raaw Art Gallery New York
2005 Video Group show, CVZ contemporary New York
SOLO SHOWS
2005 Raaw art Gallery New York
2006 Upcoming solo show, 2ART2 art Gallery, Paris