The artist whose October 7 series 'attracts fire'

It was just 10 days after the October 7 attack in Israel when artist Zoya Cherkassky Posted a drawing on her Instagram account. The drawing, “October 7, 2023,” shows three generations of a family apparently in hiding, with the mother covering her baby's mouth to keep him quiet; they all stare desperately at the viewer, their horror unmasked. Above them, a single light bulb emits a whimsical light – a direct quote from Picasso's 'Guernica', the totemic modernist depiction of the horrors of war.

Shocked and terrified, like other Israelis, by the early morning Hamas attack, in which Israeli officials say militants killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240, Cherkassky left Israel and flew the next day with her daughter Vera, 8, to Munich. (Cherkassky's husband stayed behind.) From Munich they traveled to Berlin, where she once lived and has family.

Then Cherkassky, who does not leave her home near Tel Aviv without colored pencils, started drawing.

“The same thing happened when the war in Ukraine started,” the Kiev-born Jewish artist, 47, said in a recent interview. “When everything has changed and you don't understand what's going on, being able to draw is something that makes me feel like I'm still who I was.”

After that first drawing, 11 more quickly followed before she returned to Israel. On December 15—in art museum terms, the lifespan of a fly—an installation from her “7 October 2023” series debuted in a small gallery at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, where the installation will be on view through March 18. .

The small, figurative images, made on paper with markers, pencils, crayons and watercolors, show the gruesome toll of a day that Israelis now call “Black Shabbat”: a raped corpse, her hands tied behind her mostly naked body; a woman and child standing over a pile of mutilated bodies, an allusion to Giotto's 'Massacre of the Innocents'; a family of five eating sullenly amid the charred aftermath – a drawing entitled 'Breakfast in Ashes'.

Cherkassky's extraordinary response represented her dominant mode as an artist: responding to events with which she feels an intimate connection – Soviet Jewish emigration, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Israeli violence against Palestinians and now October 7 – by rearranging previous images in the light of the circumstances. made new. And to do it quickly.

“The personal aspect of her work touched me, that diary-like response,” says Alison M. Gingeras, who curated a virtual exhibition of Cherkassky's paintings in response to the coronavirus lockdowns, which opened at the Fort Gansevoort gallery in New York in April 2020 began. There weren't so many artists who could assimilate so quickly and respond with so much authority.”

The Jewish Museum's exhibition comes at a tense time for both the American Jewish community and the American art world. Both have been torn by October 7 and Israel's continued response, a bombing campaign and invasions of Gaza that Palestinian officials say have killed more than 28,000 people.

The art community has witnessed a divide between artists, who are often critical of Israel, and donors and buyers, who tend to support them — a dynamic seen in the firing of Artforum's editor in October after the influential magazine published an open letter calling on the art establishment to support a ceasefire and Palestinian self-determination.

“The biggest shock,” said Mira Lapidot, the chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and a friend of Cherkassky, referring to the art world debate, “was this sense that this great place where contemporary art is complex and built on nuance and understanding that things can be contradictory – suddenly it's completely polarized.”

This division was reflected in a conversation the Jewish Museum had this month between Cherkassky and James S. Snyder, the museum's director. About a dozen attendees staged surprising disruptions during the lecture. They accused the museum of “manufacturing consent for genocide” and implored attendees to “face the reality of the ongoing siege of Gaza.”

The protesters also said that in mounting Cherkassky's show, the Jewish Museum had chosen “to spread imperial propaganda and participate in the violent Palestinian extermination.” according to the group of Writers Against the War on Gaza.

Cherkassky considers herself politically left and has depicted the suffering of many groups in her work. Last summer she posted on Instagram drawing that referred to Chagall's painting from World War II, “The Ukrainian Family,” but instead of the original Jews fleeing their burning village, Cherkassky drew Muslims – the woman wears a headscarf, the village has a minaret – and wrote: 'After the pogrom.' It was a reference to an attack by radical Jewish settlers, praised by ministers of the right-wing government, on the Palestinian city Huwara in the West Bank that winter.

Cherkassky defended her choice to leave her post-Oct. 7 art to Israeli victims. “It's natural for me to feel sorry for these people,” she said. “We were in shock. Something is happening, and our friends in the world seemed to say, “It depends on the context.”

Cherkassky has not yet attracted Gaza residents in the aftermath of October 7 because, she said, “the situation is not over yet.”

She added: “The fact that I feel sorry for the people in the kibbutz does not mean that I do not feel sorry for the people in Gaza.”

According to Lapidot, the politics of the moment have placed artists like Cherkassky between a rock and a hard place.

“With this series,” Lapidot said, “she has put herself out there in this way – to the outside world, and not just within the Israeli community. This is something that attracts fire.”

Seismic events in the world have often laid the foundation for Cherkassky's very personal art. She is someone who seems to follow history.

In 1991, when she was fourteen and already a student at a leading art school in Kiev, her family – her father was an architect, her mother an engineer – emigrated from Ukraine to Israel, weeks before the Soviet Union collapsed. The struggles that Soviet Jews experienced in assimilating into Israeli society were the focus of her first solo exhibition, “Pravda,” which opened at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2018.

In a 2018 judgement of her work in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the critic Shaul Setter praised the unsubtlety of the 'Pravda' paintings. “Cherkassky paints social truth sharply and clearly; you see it and are immediately convinced,” he wrote. “It hits the viewers like a bolt of lightning.”

Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine two years ago, Cherkassky was inspired by her earlier series 'Soviet Childhood' when portraying contemporary Ukrainian children confronted with war.

Cherkassky's show at Fort Gansevoort last year, “The Arrival of Foreign Professionals,” featured African migrant workers in the Soviet Union, Europe and Israel. It is partly inspired by the experiences of her husband, Sunny Nnadi, who was born in Nigeria and came to Israel. (She met him while she was painting portraits outside her Tel Aviv studio, she said; after approaching a group of men, “she chose the most beautiful one.”)

Cherkassky adopted what she calls 'appropriation art' from the Russian artist Avdey Ter-Oganyan, whom she met in Berlin. The works in '7 October 2023' refer not only to 'Guernica' and Giotto, but also to Munch's 'The Scream' and Picasso's 'Two Women Running on the Beach'.

“There's an accessibility to her figuration,” says Gingeras, the curator. 'She doesn't come from a realistic school. There is more of this quirky, sometimes a bit cartoonish illustration that you can connect with without being intimidated by a painterly language that can be alienating to someone who doesn't know art history.”

However, the cartoonish nature is arguably toned down in the October 7 series. The Jewish Museum's Snyder, who was director of the Israel Museum when it hosted Cherkassky's Pravda show, told her that he had noticed an absence of her signature “satire, caricature, dry humor” in this series.

“There's just nothing funny about October 7,” Cherkassky replied. “There was nothing to be ironic about.”

Cherkassky's images are projected onto the facade of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which overlooks a square known as 'Hostage Square' because of its status as the headquarters of the loved ones of Israelis still imprisoned.

But like the modernist artists who serve as her touchstones, Cherkassky can feel uncomfortable being included in a group's agenda.

During the lecture at the Jewish Museum this month, as guards escorted a group of activists out, Cherkassky bade them farewell with an expletive. After another set left, she told the audience of more than 200, “I'm very happy that there are privileged young people from privileged countries who can know how everyone in the world should behave.”