Ilana Raviv (born Oppenheim in 1945, Tel Aviv, Israel) is an Israeli-American artist with a career spanning over five decades. She began painting in Israel in the early 1970s and later studied at the Art Students League of New York in the 1980s.
Building upon a panoply of antecedents in both figurative and abstract art, Raviv explores complex themes ranging from the fantastical and mythological to the historical and allegorical, investigating the polarities between visual harmony and thematic dissonance through the vigorous treatment of her subjects. Her works are marked by expressive and idiosyncratic images characterized by spontaneous gestural lines interlocked with meticulously conceived color tones and are often imbued with an urgent anticipatory sense and dynamic movement, driven in part by paradoxical compositional elements that are at once structured yet unplanned, crisp yet unconfined, and whimsical yet sober.
Raviv’s works can be found in both private and public collections, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; The Okashi Art Museum, Acre; and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, among others.
Raviv lives and works in Tel Aviv.