Shilo Ratner
Shilo Ratner is a New Haven–based artist whose work explores balance, freedom, and emotional depth through geometric abstraction and layered colors.
Message
Shilo Ratner is a New Haven–based artist whose work explores balance, freedom, and emotional depth through geometric abstraction and layered color. Over the course of her practice, she has developed a distinctive visual language that merges structure with spontaneity, creating compositions that invite reflection and offer meditative spaces amid the pace of contemporary life. Anchored by natural and architectural references, her paintings convey clarity, energy, and quiet strength while reflecting the complexity and beauty of modern experience.
Ratner’s work encourages pause and engagement, using layered forms and deliberate color to create visual environments that reward sustained attention. Her art consistently bridges intuition with formal control, offering viewers both aesthetic and emotional resonance.
Ratner holds an MFA in Painting from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and a BA in Design from Curry College in Massachusetts. Her work has been exhibited widely, juried by figures such as William Theophilus Brown, Rita González, Dore Ashton, Dean Sobel, and Donna Seagar, with honors awarded by Darby Cardonsky, Will Lustenader, and Geaninne Gutierrez-Guimaraes of the Guggenheim. Her paintings are held in private and corporate collections internationally, and she continues to present her work through gallery exhibitions and public art projects. Ratner’s work offers viewers a space to slow down, breathe, and connect with what truly matters.
Statement
In my art practice, I strive to create paintings that evoke an acute awareness and centered meditative state towards our daily surroundings using a tight geometric abstract visual language. Often using a horizon line to create a point of reference for the viewer, my paintings evolve with varied opaque and translucent layers of acrylic paint on canvas. While I create a time-based visual context for my paintings with sunrises and sunsets in color choices and titles, my hyper-realistic execution of stillness through a tight complex network of lines and forms indicates an almost suffocating state of our present day reality. I strive to present a perceptual consciousness through the spatial organization of architectural and natural landscapes alike with great attention to the foundation of my colors. While easily interpreted as geometric abstract landscape paintings, it is my hope that the intensity of my compositions demands an unorthodox attention from the viewer to invest in a centered and calm vision within the chaotic times of our present day.