Shoshana Dentz (born 1968, NYC) is a Brooklyn-based painter and drawer who has been staring at a transparent, scotch-taped-together box posed with mirrors for over ten years. Her small, seemingly abstract works are based on meticulously faithful, close-up and prolonged observation of this barely-there still-life subject. In these self-contained microworlds of bounding, ephemeral reflections each element is both surface and depth. “Within without” is an accumulative, ongoing series in which abstraction’s elusive ideals are grounded with the facts and specifics of a perceptible, immediate world. Painting every detail of her nearly-impossible-to-see subject, over and over again, is to engage with the workings and instability of perception itself.
Dentz received her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2004) and her Bachelors degree from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (1989). She has been the recipient of several awards such as Pollack Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Eastside Printshop and The FID Drawing Prize. Along with residencies at Art Omi (2005, 2020), Dentz has been awarded 2021 residencies at Siena Art Institute in Siena, Italy and at Interlude Residency, Livingston NY. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The Rose Art Museum, The Graduate Center New York, MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, Rubin Museum of Art, Building 92 at The Brooklyn Navy Yard, Pera Museum Istanbul, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Center for the Arts at 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 School of Visual Arts, New York.
