Elif Uras is a Turkish artist who lives and works between New York, Istanbul, and Iznik. Across ceramics, drawing, and painting, she examines gender and class through images of women across time and place. Her labor-intensive surfaces draw on prehistoric art, antiquity, Islamic geometry, Iznik tiles, and Western modernism. Working on location in Iznik, a historic center of Ottoman ceramic production, she merges its non-figurative visual vocabulary with the female body. She uses geometric and naturalistic ornament to paint and draw onto vessels whose forms allude to femininity within a rapidly modernizing yet traditional society, foregrounding tradition, ornament, and feminized labor. She studied at Brown University, Columbia Law School, School of Visual Arts, and Columbia School of the Arts, and was Artist in Residence at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, from 2020 to 2021. Selected exhibitions include 9th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, 2012; and presentations at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; Salon 94, New York; Pera Museum, Istanbul; and Gardiner Museum, Toronto.
