11/25/2023 0 Comments Pale moon tales![]() Despite the fact that her drawings look like engravings, made in an incising process through reduction or subtraction of the material, Zuckerman’s drawings are in fact made in an act of incremental layering. Hole depicted a black, rectangular opening in the earth and a pale moon, while Two mountains with a cave shows a mountain pierced by a round black cave that looks like a naked woman spreading her legs.Īll relations between things – the sun and moon, man and woman, human and animal – are measured here through inversions and are driven by a wish to violate established hierarchies. Two large drawings hung in the gallery’s corner facing each other clarified Zuckerman’s inversions. Indeed, positive and negative ‘holes’ appear repeatedly in Zuckerman’s drawings, serving both as punctures in the image and as orifices. It pulls our gaze ‘inside’ but merely leads it to the empty surface of the paper. In Bears looking through a hole and Keyhole, an opening of a keyhole is left undrawn, depicting a blank space to which the viewer’s eye is naturally drawn. Zuckerman systematically repeats this technique in all of the works darker surfaces are made of densely drawn lines while the brighter surfaces are in fact ruptures that expose the paper as a surface. Those surfaces are left untouched by the artist, unravelling her diligent drawing work. The women's faces and hands, as well as the smoke that rises from the fire and curls up to the edge of the drawing, share an unfilled whiteness with the moon. In Smoke (all works 2012), three women that look like Russian matryoshka dolls are wrapped in cloaks and gathered around a bonfire in the middle of a forest. In her works, doors, windows and ornamented frames serve as additional framing devices, implying the condition of the drawing as a representation that is clearly separated from the outside and held together by a frame. They depict acts of peeping at what is forbidden or inappropriate, just as they appear to be products of such a gaze. A clock appears as a house, a harmless bear appears to be intimidating and vigorous, a girl is raped by a black horse: in one image she is seen lying underneath the dark beast, and in another she is on top of a bed, her legs spread, watching a monkey dance.Īdopting the point of view of a child, for whom imagination compensates for the indecipherable, a surplus of desire, or unbearable fear, Zuckerman’s drawings repeatedly render an impulse to see what lays behind closed doors, walls or shuttered windows. Several motifs reappear in her works in varying, contradictory roles that serve as coded signs in a dreamlike syntax. ![]() The figures inhabiting Zuckerman's drawings originate with a European archetypal cosmos made of old folk and fairytales as well as their later psychoanalytical interpretations, blending enchanting sweetness with creepiness. The dark sepia drawings conveyed fantastic images that recall Russian illustrations, folk art and ornaments, as well as the artist’s own childhood memories from her family dacha in Russia in the late 1980s. Twenty drawings of various sizes hung in the gallery, framed in black wood. Evidently foreign to the sun-drenched urbanity of Tel Aviv, Alexandra Zuckerman’s drawings in the exhibition ‘What the Moon Saw’ inhabit moonlit forests, wooden cabins, bears, wolves, horses, rabbits, goats and erotic occurrences of joyful sinisterness.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |