Published: 5 May 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
IN THE YEAR OF THE 11TH PLAGUE, Zoya Cherkassky—the Ukrainian-born bad girl of Israeli art—makes an unexpected swerve into Chagall territory, albeit with a subtle punk twist. On first viewing, most of the 19 ink and watercolour drawings in Lost Time, an online exhibition that opened the first night of Passover, would hardly seem out of place hanging above the Seder plate-displaying breakfront in a 1950s Bensonhurst apartment.
But, as with all of the 44-year-old artist’s work, there is an edge. The drawings were made at a rate of one per day, with Cherkassky self-quarantined in her Tel Aviv studio. They can thus be seen as a response to the global pandemic.
Cherkassky practices a form of sophisticated primitivism. A Jew in Ukraine but not, because of her mother’s lineage, considered one in Israel, the artist may be a perpetual outsider but hers is not at all outsider art. (Indeed, she got her training both at the National Academy of Art in Kyiv and the Thelma Yellin High School in Giv’atayim.)
One of her many self-reflexive works is the diptych School Mobbing (2014) in which the identical, bespectacled, violin-clutching boychik is bullied as a Jew in Russia and as a Russian in Israel. One cannot fail to note that, scattered across the schoolyard, the Mozart score the boy was carrying is being casually pissed on.
FULL STORY Post-Soviet Jewish punk art (Tablet)
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Artwork: ‘Shabes Goy,’ 2020 (Fort Gansevoort)
