The aliyah art of Avraham Vofsi

Australian artist Avraham Vofsi held “almost no ideas about Israel” before visiting the country in 2022. A year later – and a month before the country was upended by October 7 – he moved there.

Since then, Vofsi’s work has largely centred on the experience of living in Israel. His most recent oils issue forth songs of loss, pain, and beauty.

An encounter with his paintings evokes the startling faith of Shaul Tchernichovsky in his Hebrew poem Ani Ma’Amin (I Believe). “I still believe in mankind /in its spirit, great and bold.”

When Vofsi, now 35 , became a 2022 Archibald Prize finalist for his audacious John Safran as David and Goliath, he had only been painting for a few years, developing a classical realist style that engages with archetypes and mythology, and often emits an absorbing emotionality.

He relates of his former life in Australia, ‘I always felt very out of place: too loud, too excited, too ready to feel things…When I arrived here, apart from coming home as a Jew, maybe even more powerful … [was the feeling that] the society fit me so well.’

Vofsi has just completed HaAliyah: Visions of the Rise, a monumental series exploring the seismic aftermath of October 7. Each of the paintings is abundant with references notably to the theme of Aliyah (ascent) and the related word alut (cost).

The series will be on display in Australia at gala events to celebrate 100 years of Technion in Melbourne and Sydney in early December.

Vofsi revealed the background to a selection of these works for The Jewish Independent:

Erez Eshel at Zikim

Vofsi was approached with a request to paint Erez Eshel by a friend working on a book pairing artists and poets with stories of heroic individuals. Eshel is a founder of the Mechina leadership academies and a Lieutenant Colonel in the reserves. He was in and out of army service and had little time to sit for a portrait. Until then, Vofsi’s preferred method of portraiture was highly collaborative but Eshel’s spirit and story were characterised by decisive action. He expected clarity of direction from the artist painting him. Vofsi attributes this encounter to developing his sense of assertiveness, "Israelis expect you to say what you want … which is basically the opposite of all my Australian training."

The Car Wall Outside Kibbutz Tkuma

At Moshav Tkuma, Vofsi was confronted by a terrible assemblage. Hundreds of damaged cars; some burnt, others pocked with bullets. They were from the Nova Festival massacre site, its surrounding highway area and the Gaza Envelope communities. The cars had been transported to the Tkuma site after removal of any human remains. Once there, they were identified and inspected for any other remains or belongings. Over a period of three days Vofsi returned to the site. Its immensity elicited a sense of awe. He refers to it as “overwhelming … indescribable and unbelievable.’

The painting took eight months to complete and is his largest landscape. Vofsi has noticed that “barely anyone can look at it head on”.

The tension in the work resides in the artist’s unwillingness “to put horrible images into the world because I can’t do that and there are already too many of them. And [equally not wanting] … to paint something that’s false.” It was not until he realised exactly how the light would fall that he reached his impossible objective; “I was trying to create something beautiful out of the pain.”

The painting was recently included in a Jerusalem group show titled No Words. “It was very powerful. That was the first little step in my aliyah journey to make me feel that I have something to say, I have something to give back to Israel. The place that’s my home now.”

Bring them Home: Dogtags with Yellow Ribbon

Vofsi’s recent interest in still lifes was ignited by the idea that Jews “take our history with us in our objects”, especially ritual ones. The dogtags and yellow ribbon have taken on the significance of ritual symbols of remembrance.
A crack in the wall draws the attention beyond the objects and an interplay between darkness and light features most intensely in this painting. The effulgent yellow of hope is not cancelled out by the absence of light even when the latter might summon the terror of the existence of underground spaces.

Kikar Dizengoff at Sunset

Living in Jerusalem, Vofsi noticed that Tel Aviv manifested a different sense of loss, one encapsulated by Kikar Dizengoff’s grass-roots memorial.
This painting is “an amalgamation of images … the mythic version”, including different times of day and various vantage points to capture the symbols of public memory: red anemones, teddy bears, yarzheit candles and stickers of hostages and soldiers killed.

Keren Shalom, after Christina’s World

Vofsi visited Keren Shalom kibbutz to lead the restoration of its mural which had been damaged when terrorists broke through its security fence, and spoke with women whose husbands had been killed defending the community.

“You could feel the eeriness of this place. It wasn’t one of the burnt kibbutzim … but all the windows were boarded up and there were bullet holes in it.”

The composition was taken from Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, an iconic American painting where a woman with a degenerative disease lies on the ground oriented towards her farmhouse. Although the work is haunting, it also speaks of individual endurance.

“‘The women I met there were religious, so I had a religious friend of mine pose in that position … [that represented] something about this loss of safety. This idea of looking back at this kibbutz that no longer has the feeling that it used to. Where we are standing, there is nothing behind us but the security barrier. That is also what’s so eerie about it; it’s the last house before the wall. It has a real unease.”