Alexandra Zuckerman is a drawer and painter. She lives and works in Tel Aviv, and holds a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, and studied at Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Zuckerman has exhibited solo exhibitions at prestigious museums and galleries such as Sabot Gallery, Romania; Iaspis Open House, Sweden; Center of Contemporary Art, Latvia; Open Space, Art Cologne; Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv; Iaspis Open House, Stockholm, as well as group exhibitions at the Riis Galleri, Sweden; 427 Gallery, Latvia; MK Search Art, Italy, among others.
She won multiple awards, including the Excellence in the Arts award from Bezalel Fine Arts Department, Jerusalem and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Scholarship.
MIII JAFFA: Hi Alexandra how are you doing these days?
A.Z: Hi, I feel a bit like in the movie “Groundhog Day” with Bill Murray, waking up every day to the same day, doing what needs to be done and trying to rest in between. There aren’t many brakes, but there is also something pleasant about intensive time with the family, full of love.
MIII JAFFA: Tell us something about the works from the collection we see here.
A.Z: Both works were exhibited in a solo exhibition “What the moon saw?” at Noga Gallery in Tel Aviv 2013, and are part of a large body of work made with the same drawing technique.
In the work “Two Mountains with Cave” is a still landscape with a cave and bare trees. The black opening of the cave is in the center of the painting, and the landscape around it opens in the shape of a symmetrical butterfly. The other hole in the drawing is the moon that appears on the right, the moon is the white of the paper, meaning it’s a void. Although the landscape seems imaginary you can recognize the slope park in Jaffa, I used to live just above it, with it’s empty hills and bare trees in winter.
In the second work “Storm” you see houses and trees flying in a storm, like Dorothy’s home in Kansas. The motif of home reoccurs in my works, many times the outside in the drawings is through the interior (through a window or doorway), in the case of this drawing the outside is out of control. I had another version of the same drawing, as if framed in a room and the scene of the storm is seen through the door. In this drawing there is something wilder and more disturbing, a sense of danger.
MIII JAFFA: Did you experience them differently in the context of these days?
A.Z: Only in the last year and a half have I been working in a studio outside of my home. For many years the work was done on a table, several tables or on the walls inside my home. I loved spending a lot of time with the works and was busy drawing most of the time. I loved that there was no separation, the images as if rolled into each other, my physical home and the environment in which I lived and created in were part of the world of images.
Something in this quarantine state exists in the works, and almost in all of them appears a home. A kind of a confused indoor and outdoor experience. Like a reflection of each other. In the current situation, I think about this relationship because everything becomes indoor somehow.
MIII JAFFA: What are you working on now?
A.Z: I’m working on a whole new series of works, in this series I completely give up the image or inclination to a narrative that characterized my earlier works. The works are drawings of patterns of embroidery that repeat themselves, and they are drawn on a grid that I draw manually. I am interested in the abstraction created through these images and the movement they create. The work on the drawings is very slow and it takes several weeks to create each drawing. Despite the considerable time required to complete them the experience of looking at them creates space and quiet.
MIII JAFFA: Thoughts on the future?
A.Z: I was scheduled to open a solo exhibition at Noga Gallery in May, I was waiting for it for a long time. Now that everything is postponed,all things are given a different meaning. I just hope this crisis will be behind us soon and that we will feel free and protected again.
