When Brian Belott began assembling “Upside Down Zebra” at The Watermill Center in Water Mill, New York, he already had Sivan Lavie in mind. He had been watching her work on Instagram since 2016, drawn by the intensity of her color and the strangeness of her materials. He was also excited by posts of her making art with young children, with the same seriousness and pleasure she brought to her own canvases. That combination stayed with him. When they finally met in person in 2023, at a show curated by their mutual friend Chris Martin at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, he invited her to participate in the exhibition shortly after their first conversation.
“Upside Down Zebra,” soon closing, ran from June 2025 through the end of May 2026 and was the largest exhibition in The Watermill Center’s history, filling six indoor galleries with nearly one thousand works from the Rhoda Kellogg International Child Art Collection alongside new and existing work by more than forty contemporary artists. The institution, founded by Robert Wilson and one of the most respected sites for experimental practice in the country, drew participants including Carroll Dunham, Christopher Wool, Richard Tuttle, Katherine Bernhardt, and Ugo Rondinone.
Lavie’s paintings found their place in that company without difficulty. Her large dots and circles, saturated and buoyant against white grounds, have been the through-line of her practice for more than a decade, and the context of “Upside Down Zebra” suited them with precision: here was work that had always operated on the same frequency as the children’s drawings surrounding it, sharing their directness and physical confidence while carrying the full weight of a trained and rigorous studio practice. The show made visible something that had always been true of Lavie’s paintings: that the freedom in them was not a starting point but an achievement.
That same season she organized and presented “Confessional Flowers,” a solo at Satellite Art Gallery in New York, founded by artist and gallerist Brian Andrew Whiteley. The show was entirely hers: conceived, curated, and installed by Lavie, bringing paintings, sculptural works, and installation together into a unified environment rather than a grouping of individual objects. The two exhibitions running in the same year—one an invitation into one of the most prestigious institutional surveys of American contemporary art, the other a fully self-directed solo in the heart of the New York independent scene—gave a clear picture of where Lavie stands.
She came to New York with a body of work built steadily and seriously across nearly a decade. Born in Haifa in 1992 and raised between Zurich and London, she returned to Israel in 2016 and completed an MFA with honors at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, the country’s foremost institution for fine art. The work she made during those years was already finding its audience. A year later she moved into the Central Bus Station, one of Tel Aviv’s most loaded and peculiar architectural environments, for a two-month residency that produced “Let There Be Glitter.” The show occupied an entire fifth-floor gallery space, and Lavie filled it with large unstretched white canvases hung and freestanding throughout the room, each carrying her painted dots, lines, and arcs in bold acrylic color. The scale was total: paintings wrapped columns, lined corridors, and spilled into public-facing windows visible from the station’s interior mall below. A sculptural work sat on the floor at the center, and the opening included a live performance. The exhibition was reviewed at length by Portfolio Magazine and documented by photographer Youval Hai. It closed days after opening, shut down by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lavie chose not to treat this as a loss.
Two years later she presented “My Lucky Heart” at the Magasin III Jaffa Bookstore Vitrine, the Israeli outpost of the internationally recognized Stockholm institution Magasin III, one of Scandinavia’s most respected contemporary art museums. The scale here was the opposite of the Central Bus Station: a vitrine, a single compressed window display demanding that the work operate at close range and hold a viewer passing by on the street. Lavie’s response was characteristically precise, a concentrated arrangement of her signature forms that turned the constraint of the format into an argument for the power of small things to open large spaces. The presentation ran concurrently with a solo exhibition by Polly Apfelbaum, one of the most significant American artists working with color, pattern, and abstraction. Taken together, the two shows reveal the full range of Lavie’s ambition: she could fill a warehouse and she could fill a vitrine, and in both cases the work was entirely itself.
By 2023 she had begun curating. “Dream Gurlz” at Binyamin Gallery in Tel Aviv’s Kiryat HaMelacha arts district was a show with a declared position and a specific target. The exhibition statement put it plainly: the show stemmed from a desire to expand the space and legitimacy available in the local art scene for work whose main purpose is aesthetic, something sometimes considered trivial in Israel. Lavie assembled an international roster of eight artists from Israel, Germany, and the United States, including Karen Dolev, Jessica Petrilak, Shani Pri-Nes, Clara Kaiser, Lee Raz, Shahaf Shua, and Alexandra Zuckerman, united by their shared investment in the aesthetic, the feminine, the colorful, and the handmade. The exhibition created what its statement described as direct bridges between international artists with similar goals, in an established gallery space in Tel Aviv. Lavie was not asking for permission to make joyful work. She was placing it in the center of the room and inviting the art world to catch up.
Ohad Shaaltiel, then Pedagogic Director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, saw in that exhibition and in Lavie’s practice exactly what he needed for a year-long children’s workshop program he was developing at the museum. He invited her to design and lead it. The connection was not coincidental: the qualities that made her compelling to Shaaltiel were the same ones that had caught Belott’s attention on Instagram years earlier and would eventually bring her to Water Mill.
For Lavie, working with children has never been separate from what she does in the studio. She has been a teacher since 2017, when she received the Amitei Bezalel Rothschild Foundation Scholarship while studying for her MFA. Since then, she has taught in schools, museums, and preschools in Israel and the United States, bringing her own artistic practices of free-spirited playfulness into early childhood and elementary education. She is a truly experimental teacher, preferring the atelierista model of allowing children to explore art materials in an open-ended way without a specific product in mind. Both her teaching and her art practice proceed from the same beliefs: that color communicates directly to the body, that making can be a form of genuine knowledge, and that there is no meaningful hierarchy between the instincts of a child with a brush and the intentions of a trained artist. The paintings she makes are attempts to close that distance. The children’s workshops are attempts to close it from the other direction.
She is now based in New York, publishing poetry and fiction in Hobart, teaching children, and making paintings. The circles keep appearing. They are not going anywhere.
