About The Artist

CELIA RABINOVITCH, an artist and writer, creates luminous paintings that evoke mood, atmosphere and ambiguity, and a sense of the uncanny. Her work has been shown in Canada, Europe, and the USA—including at the 1999 Florence Biennale and the 2018 international exhibition on climate change at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum, HUC-JIR, in New York. Born in rural Manitoba, she became interested in the connections between art and spirituality, and earned degrees on McGill University (PhD, religions) and the University of Wisconsin (MFA, painting). She has held positions as director for Fine Arts at UC Berkeley-Extension; and has taught at California College of Art, the San Francisco Art Institute, Syracuse University and Stanford University. She engages others with a passion for art through her teaching, and writing, and is the author of Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros and the Occult in Modern Art, (2003) and the newly released Duchamp's Pipe: A Chess Romance - Marcel Duchamp & George Koltanowski (2020). In her painting and drawing, Celia draws inspiration from light, landscape, and memory as well as poetry, Chinese painting, comparative mythology, and abstraction -- filtered through the lens of imagination and manifest in fluent technique. Her light-filled paintings evoke contemplation and mystery. Selected exhibitions include The Grotto Cycle at the Beck Center Museum, Cleveland and YYZ Gallery, Toronto; the Winnipeg Art Gallery; University of California-Berkeley; Quattro, a four-person exhibition in Vienna. She has been awarded artist in residence at the University of Victoria, Canada, 2016; the John a Sproul Memorial Fellow, Berkeley 2013; and received The Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, and The Department of Foreign Affairs, Canada awards for painting.