Pnina Granirer’s artwork explores a wide variety of themes – family and childhood, past and present, the duality of good and evil, landscape, dislocation, femaleness and family obligations, the relationship between nature and culture – the soft body and the hard world. She is a Vancouver-based mixed media artist influenced by fairytales, Romanian folk art and German Expressionism. She believes beauty co-exists with cruelty, violence and war. The images in her prints, drawings, watercolours and mixed media compositions express the universality of humanity, drawn from her ties to both the culture of the Old World and the West Coast.
Born to Jewish parents in 1935 Romania, Granirer and her family narrowly missed transportation to extermination camps when the Red Army drove out Nazi forces in 1944. She and her family later emigrated to Israel where she attended the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. She spent time in France and the US before moving with her husband to Canada in 1965. In 1993, she founded Artists in Our Midst, the first art walk in Vancouver. She is the author of a number of books, including Light Within the Shadows: A Painter’s Memoir, published in 2017 and her most recent Garden of Words, an illustrated book of poems published in 2022. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including the Bau-Xi Gallery in Vancouver, Burnaby Art Gallery, Richmond Art Gallery, galleries in Victoria, Calgary, Winnipeg and Toronto, as well as galleries in the US, France, Czech Republic, Yugoslavia and Australia. Her work can be found in national and international private and public collections.
“There is so much richness and possibility of using the imagination when combining various materials. For me, this technique (mixed media) reflects the richness of nature, where there is no end to variations of shapes and materials.” Quote from Celebrated Visual Artist and Holocaust Survivor Pnina Granirer Blends Art and Poetry in a New Book, by Janet Nichol, Feb 22, 2022, https://montecristomagazine.com/arts/celebrated-visual-artist-holocaust-survivor-pnina-granirer-blends-art-poetry-new-book.
For all you deep art divers out there.
Artist’s website
Books:
Light Within the Shadows: A Painter’s Memoir, The British Columbia Review – Book Review
Garden of Words, The British Columbia Review – Book Review
Artist Biography/Memoir by Ted Lindberg – Pnina Granirer: Portrait of an Artist, Books in Canada – Book Review
The Canadian Art Preservation Foundation posts short biographies and information on artists and artwork from its collection in a not-so-subtle attempt to capture your attention and interest in our mission, but we also just want to keep this artwork in view. We are excited about the art we collect and want to share it with you. CAPF is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the artwork of Canada’s superstar artists for future generations to examine, study and exhibit – the ones you know and the ones you might not know so well. We accept artwork, journals, notes, letters, exhibition catalogues and anything else that might comprise a visual and/or intellectual “portrait” (ahem, please pardon the pun) of a particular artist.
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