Sylvia Safdie

Biography

Sylvia Safdie has a collection that she began as a child on the beaches near Haifa: stones and other small natural things, sorted by size, shape, colour, material and place of origin. All of her work grew out of that habit.

She was born on 17 August 1942 in Aley, Lebanon, into the Syrian Jewish family of Leon and Rachel Safdie, the youngest of three children. Her elder brother Moshe Safdie (born 1938) became an architect, and the middle child, Gabriel (born 1940), a poet and teacher of literature. Her early childhood was spent on Mount Carmel in Israel. In 1953, when she was eleven, the family moved from Haifa to Montreal. The artist herself links that move with a feeling of displacement, which her childhood pastimes helped to ease: on the beaches of Haifa she built sandcastles and watched the waves wash them away, and that, by her own account, is where her interest in impermanence comes from.

She came to painting late: she worked as a dental assistant and travelled. At twenty-six, while recovering from an operation, she began to paint. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal in 1975; her first solo exhibition, at the Galerie de l’Esprit in Montreal, took place the same year.

In the 1970s she made sculptural installations from found natural objects. In the early 1980s she turned to painting in oil with added earth; scratching away and layering are characteristic of her process. Photography followed later, and from 2001 video, sometimes with sound and sometimes without. Journeys to places of Jewish history and family roots, to Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem, and also to Morocco, Mexico and India, gave her material: she collected or filmed natural objects and the traces of a place over time. She has gathered more than five hundred earth samples, and their pigments go into her paintings and drawings.

Safdie’s sculptures form series and are often titled with simple Hebrew words: “Zakhor” (memory), “Keren” (ray of light) and “Lahav” (eternal flame). She often works on a single piece or series for years. “Keren No. 4” (1999) is a copper barrel holding an open book with blank pages: as the viewer walks around the barrel, the pages, lit by a ray of light, seem to turn. The “Earth Marks” series, begun in 1997, uses earth pigments mixed with oil on Mylar, with semi-abstract figures that seem to emerge or disappear. The human body, especially the female body, and nature are bound very closely together in her work; in her words, she was interested in how nature forms us and how the body is part of it.

In her videos she slows time down. “Gulls” (2002) shows a bird hovering in flight, a silent clip played on a loop. In “Gladys: A Life” (2005) the camera watches Gladys Barnes, aged ninety-five, a native of Trout River, Newfoundland, between sleep and waking: a smile slowly forms, the eyes close. The project “The Absent Present” (2010) brought together three videos shot at Auschwitz (a pond, a reflection, a web; 2011) and the sculpture “Lehav” (1993). On film, rain falls on flooded areas of the camp, and the water serves as a metaphor for reflection. The sources disagree on the dates of the project and of the videos in it, so I give both.

Her solo exhibitions have been held in Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Vancouver, Calgary, Regina and other cities. In 2021 the Darling Foundry in Montreal showed her installation “As I Walk”, made of earth materials she had gathered over many years: some objects vaguely resemble feet and faces and carry traces of movement and time. The magazine Vie des Arts called it masterly, and Artforum called it haunting. In 2025–2026 the exhibition “Sylvia Safdie: TERRA” was held at the National Gallery of Canada. She has taken part in group shows since 1978, from the first Biennale for Québec Artists to an exhibition in Swansea, Wales, in 2018.

Her works are in the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Her awards include first prize from the Thomas More Institute in Montreal (1991, 1993), and grants from the Government of Quebec and the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2000 the director Doina Harap made a film about her, “Earth Marks”, and a book published in 2013 examines her videos of 2001–2012. She lives and works in Montreal.