Aithan Shapira

Regularly walking across the Thames over Hungerford Bridge during his time as a student at the Royal College of Art, Aithan was drawn to an abandoned life preserver on a pillar supporting the bridge. The image has continued to appear and evolve in his work, in cutouts of discarded cardboard, large-scale etchings in steel, painted in fox traps, and hundreds cast in concrete. His work was first exhibited as part of a group exhibition at Harvard University’s Sackler Museum, MA (2015), followed by solo exhibits at the Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, FL (2015) and the JCC Manhattan, NY (2016), and evolving iterations were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018) and installed across New York City streets as part of Stations of the Cross, CCNY, NY (2018). His works are characterized by their layers of contradictions, some more overt in material and form such as concrete and soap life preservers, and others more subtle as inverting depths of field. He weaves shape and pattern into tightly composed poetic representations that ask us to consider the changeability in which the same object can take on vastly different meanings.