Shilo Ratner
Shilo Ratner is a New Haven–based artist whose geometric abstract work explores balance, movement, and emotional depth through layered color and structure.
Message
Shilo Ratner is a geometric abstract artist based in New Haven, Connecticut, working through painting and site-responsive installations that translate landscape into structured visual systems.
Her practice engages natural environments as a source for abstraction, distilling terrain into geometric compositions built through layered planes, color relationships, and spatial tension. Working between observation and construction, she reconstructs landscape rather than depicting it directly, developing compositions shaped by processes of reduction, adjustment, and refinement.
Ratner’s work explores the relationship between structure and perception, where clarity and movement coexist within carefully constructed visual fields.
Her work has been recognized by curators and jurors including Theophilus Brown, Rita González, Dore Ashton, Dean Sobel, Donna Seager, Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, and David Max Horowitz. She has exhibited at institutions including Museum of Contemporary Art Marin, Mystic Museum of Art, Marietta Cobb Museum of Art, Greenwich Art Society, and Candita Clayton Gallery, and is the recipient of the Dagny Hultgreen Award for Best in Show at the Greenwich Art Society’s 103rd Annual Bendheim Exhibit.
She holds an MFA in Painting from Academy of Art University and a BA in Design from Curry College.
View more of her work at shiloratner.com or on instagram: @shiloratner
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.