Ronit Baranga Sculpts The Struggle Between Still Life And Living In Clay Form
Israeli artist Ronit Baranga is a contemporary sculptor and installation artist who began her practice in the early 2000s. Over the past two decades, she has transitioned from painting to ceramics. After completing her degree, she enrolled in art school, where she first encountered clay, a material that has since become her primary means of expression. Her playful, uncanny creations walk the line between the living and the inanimate, exploring emotional states and relationships. By merging everyday objects with elements of the human body, she creates hyperrealistic works that evoke myths, fairy tales, and fantasies.
Baranga loves working with clay and finds the physical sensation of handling the material particularly compelling. Her whimsical, surreal, and often unpredictable assemblages address complex contemporary themes such as identity, control, and consumption in a way that is simultaneously unsettling and alluring. The endless possibilities and wide range of techniques that clay offers make it an ideal medium for experimenting with evolving ideas. She describes her studio as an intensely driven environment where she works on multiple series at once. With many pieces in progress simultaneously, she may start her day on one sculpture and end it focused on another. Instead of relying heavily on sketches or drawings, she prefers to “sculpt it out” intuitively, allowing each work to develop organically.
More info: Instagram | RonitBaranga
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For Baranga, inspiration can come from anywhere. She usually begins a piece when she feels the first pull of an irresistible urge to create. As an avid reader, she believes her constant engagement with art and diverse fields of knowledge deepens her conceptual thinking and helps her create work that is both engaging and precise. Speaking about the humanoid elements in her sculptures, she explains: “The human body fascinates me. My work always involves people, whether drawing them, reading about them or trying to understand them. This is life itself. The human figure is such a broad topic that it allows me to make art open enough for any viewer to see themselves in their analysis of my art.”
Baranga further elaborated, “In recent years, I have returned to figurative art. I find great interest, difficulty, and enormous challenge in sculpting based on a model (and, in some stages of the work, sculpting based on my photographs of the model). To transfer a three-dimensional image to three-dimensional art or a two-dimensional image, a photograph, to three-dimensional art, is pure pleasure.”
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