Ruth Mordecai
New Works on Paper

In Ruth Mordecai’s works on paper, most often black and white paint or collage defines sculptural forms, and added lines expand the work into pictorial space, exploring memory and spiritual resonance through cultural symbols such as apples, baskets, and ladders. Color is spare but prominent.

Mordecai takes up philosophical and religious questions through a visual exploration of shared symbols. Her works on paper embody exquisite sculptural tensions of gravity and balance, or else are sculptural forms imbued with the movement of painterly gesture. Her love for the human form and for our spiritual relationships to shared symbols endow her work with depth and warmth.

Mordecai describes her process as “the stacking of various images that over the years have become the iconography of the work: Jacob’s Ladder, the moon, apples, an ancient sun, a horizon line, a basket or wagon or figures in dance.” Ruth Mordecai earned a BFA and MFA from Boston University College of Fine Arts. For twenty-five years she made sculpture and painted in Boston’s Fort Point District. For the last fifteen years, she has painted in a studio on Rocky Neck in Gloucester.

Ruth Mordecai has shown in Boston, New York, and Washington, DC, and her art is in prestigious collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel); the Rose Art Museum; and the Wiggin Prints and Drawings Collection of the Boston Public Library.