It was only 10 days after the October 7 attack in Israel when artist Zoya Cherkassky was posted a drawing on her Instagram account. The drawing, “Oct. 7, 2023,” depicts three generations of a family seemingly in hiding, with the mother covering her baby’s mouth to keep it quiet. They all look desperately at the viewer, their horror revealed. Above them a lone lamp emits jagged illumination – a direct quote from Picasso’s Guernica, the totemic modernist depiction of the horrors of war.
Shocked and horrified, like other Israelis, by the early morning attack by Hamas, in which Israeli officials say the militants killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240, Cherkasky fled Israel and flew to Munich with her daughter, Vera, 8, the next day. (Cherkasky’s husband stayed behind.) From Munich they traveled to Berlin, where she once lived and has family.
Then Cherkassky, who tends not to leave her home near Tel Aviv without colored pencils, started drawing.
“The same thing happened when the war started in Ukraine,” 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 paint — it’s something that makes me feel like I’m still who I was.”
After that first draw, 11 more quickly followed before he returned to Israel. As of Dec. 15 — in art museum terms, the lifespan of a fly — an installation in her series, “October 7, 2023,” debuted in a small gallery at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, where it will run through March 18 .
The small, figurative images, created on paper with markers, pencils, crayons and watercolors, show the gruesome toll of the day Israelis now call “Black Shabbat”: A mutilated corpse, her hands bound behind her mostly bare frame . A woman and child standing over a pile of mangled bodies, an allusion to Giotto’s Massacre of the Innocents. a family of five eating sullenly amid the charred aftermath — a drawing titled Breakfast in Ashes.
Cherkassky’s extraordinary response represented her dominant mode as an artist: responding to events with which she feels a close connection—Soviet Jewish immigration, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israeli violence against Palestinians, and now October 7—by recasting earlier images in light of of circumstances have made news. And let’s do it quickly.
“The personal aspect of her work touched me, that diary response,” said Alison M. Gingeras, who curated a virtual exhibit of Cherkassky’s paintings responding to the coronavirus lockdowns that opened at New York’s Fort Gansevoort Gallery in April. 2020. “There were not so many artists who could so quickly assimilate and respond with such authority.”
The Jewish Museum’s exhibition comes at a difficult time for both the American Jewish community and the American art world. Each has collapsed since Oct. 7 and Israel’s ongoing response, a campaign of bombings and incursions into Gaza that have killed more than 28,000, according to Palestinian officials.
The art community has seen a divide between artists, who are often critical of Israel, and donors and buyers, who tend to be supportive – a dynamic seen in the firing of Artforum’s editor in October after the publication of the influential magazine 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’s, referring to the art world debate, “was this sense that this great place where contemporary art can have complexity and it’s based on a nuance and an understanding that things can be contradictory — suddenly, it’s completely polarizing.”
Those differences played out in a conversation at the Jewish Museum between Cherkassky and James S. Snyder, the museum’s director, this month. About a dozen of those present caused sudden interruptions during the speech. They accused the museum of “constructing consensus on genocide” and implored attendees to “face the reality of the ongoing siege of Gaza.”
Protesters also said that the Jewish Museum, in the context of Cherkassky’s performance, chose to “proliferate imperial propaganda and participate in the violent Palestinian erasure.” according the group Writers Against the War on Gaza.
Cherkassky considers herself to be on the political left and has represented the plight of many groups in her work. Last summer, he posted on Instagram a plan which referred to Chagall’s World War II-era painting, “The Ukrainian Family” but instead of the original’s Jews fleeing their burning village, Cherkasky painted Muslims—the woman wears a headscarf, the village has a minaret—and captioned it “After the pogrom.” It was a reference to an attack by radical Jewish settlers, praised by right-wing government ministers, in the Palestinian city Huwara on the West Bank that winter.
Cherkassky defended her choice to dedicate after October. 7 art in Israeli victims. “For me, it’s obvious that I have compassion for these people,” he 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 pulled Gazans in the wake of Oct. 7 because, he said, “the situation is not over yet.”
He added: “Just because I have compassion for the people in the kibbutz doesn’t mean I don’t have compassion for the people in Gaza.”
The politics of the moment have put artists like Cherkassky between rock and hard, according to Lapidot.
“In that series,” Lapidot said, “she put herself out there in that way — to the outside world, not just within the Israeli community. That was something that attracts fire.”
Seismic world events have often given flavor to Cherkasky’s highly personal art. He is someone the story seems to follow.
In 1991, when she was 14 and already a student at a prominent art school in Kiev, her family—her father an architect, her mother an engineer—immigrated from Ukraine to Israel weeks before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The struggles experienced by Soviet Jews 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 review of her work in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, critic Shaul Setter praised the subtlety of the “Pravda” paintings. “Cherkasky paints social truth vividly and clearly. one sees it and is immediately convinced of it,” he wrote. “It hits the viewers like lightning.”
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago, Cherkassky drew inspiration from her earlier series ‘Soviet Childhood’ in imaging modern children of Ukraine facing war.
Cherkassky’s show at Fort Gansevoort last year, “The Arrival of Foreign Professionals,” showed African migrant workers in the Soviet Union, Europe and Israel. It was partly inspired by the experiences of her husband, Sunny Nnadi, who was born in Nigeria and came to Israel. (She met him while painting portraits outside her studio in Tel Aviv, she said; after a group of men approached her, “she picked the most beautiful one.”)
Cherkassky picked up what she calls the “art of appropriation” from the Russian artist Avdey Ter-Oganyan, whom she met in Berlin. The works in “October 7, 2023” refer not only to “Guernica” and Giotto, but to “The Scream” by Munch and “Two Women Running on the Beach” by Picasso.
“There’s an accessibility to her visualization,” said Gingeras, the curator. “He doesn’t come from a realistic school. There’s more of that idiosyncratic, sometimes slightly cartoony illustration that allows you to connect without being intimidated by a painterly language that can be alienating to someone who doesn’t know art history.”
However, the cartooning has been decidedly 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 he had noticed an absence of her typical “satire, caricature, dry humor” in that series.
“There is nothing funny about October 7,” replied Cherkasky. “There was nothing ironic.”
Cherkassky’s images have been displayed on the facade of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art which faces a square known as “Hostage Square” because of its status as the home of loved ones of Israelis who remain captives.
However, like the modernist artists who serve as her tests, Cherkassky can seem uncomfortable stepping into a group’s agenda.
At the Jewish Museum speech this month, as security guards escorted a group of activists out, Cherkasky waved goodbye to them. After another set was forced to leave, she told the audience of more than 200, “I’m very, very happy that there are privileged young people from privileged countries who can know how everyone in the world should act.”