Elif Uras

Elif Uras (b. Ankara) attended Brown University and Columbia Law School before receiving a BFA from School of Visual Arts and and MFA from Columbia School of the Arts. Her practice spans ceramics, drawing and painting.

In her works, Uras explores ideas of gender and class related to representation of women across different geographies and time. She often employs labor intensive intricate patterns on her surfaces inspired by diverse art historic sources including Prehistoric art, antiquity, Islamic geometry, Iznik tiles and Western modernism. Her work also engages with questions of tradition, ornament and labor, especially feminized labor.

Often working on location in Iznik (Nicaea), where the most renowned tiles and ceramics of the Ottoman Empire were produced centuries ago, Uras produces works in ceramic that incorporate the non-figurative visual vocabulary of Iznik with the female body. Subverting tradition the intricate geometric and naturalistic patterns are employed to paint and draw on vessels whose forms allude to the ideas of femininity in a rapidly modernizing yet traditional society. Her works have also been exhibited at Metropolitan Museum, MoMA PS1, Salon 94, New York, 9th Shanghai Biennale and Pera Museum. Uras’s works are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Victoria and Albert Museum. Uras was an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York in 2020-2021.

Elif Uras lives and works between New York, Istanbul and Iznik.