Tel Aviv artist draws on Picasso's 'Guernica' to paint the horrors of the Oct.7 Hamas attacks

Record ID: 1759555

  • Title: Tel Aviv artist draws on Picasso's 'Guernica' to paint the horrors of the Oct.7 Hamas attacks
  • Date: 4th January 2024
  • Summary: TEL AVIV, ISRAEL (RECENT - DECEMBER 26, 2023) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF ISRAELI-UKRAINIAN PAINTER ZOYA CHERKASSKY TOUCHING UP HER PAINTING ENTITLED '7 OCT. 2023' (SOUNDBITE) (English) ISRAELI-UKRAINIAN PAINTER, ZOYA CHERKASSKY, SAYING: "When I heard what happened and... and first of all, I thought it happened only in Be'eri Kibbutz, because the information that we were getting,
  • Embargoed: 18th January 2024 07:10
  • Keywords: Hamas Israel Zoya Cherkassky conflict hostages painter war
  • Location: VARIOUS
  • City: VARIOUS
  • Country: Israel
  • Topics: Conflicts/War/Peace,Middle East
  • Reuters ID: LVA001936302012024RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: For Ukrainian-Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky, the October 7 Hamas attacks in southern Israel felt like living through her own ‘Guernica’, referring to Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s bold black and white painting of the horrors of war when Germany bombed the town of Guernica, northern Spain, in 1937.
    “Because this is what my cultural memory brought me. And the... and this is also why this first image that I made is based on... it's like a quote in Guernica. It's, like, not really reminds Guernica. But there is a quotation from this painting," she said in Tel Aviv last month.
    As news of the attacks on Israeli communities unfolded that day, she was also reminded of the war in her native Ukraine when Russia launched an invasion in February 2022 and attacked cities including Kyiv. Cherkassky was born in Ukraine and emigrated with her parents to Israel when she was 14 years old in 1991.
    “When I woke up on the morning of 24th of February 2022, I had a similar feeling, like, I woke up and I've seen that Kyiv was bombed,” Cherkassky said.
    So she immediately decided to move her daughter out of the country.
    "I went to Germany on the second day, on eighth of October I already went to Germany," Cherkassky said in her studio in southern Tel Aviv's Kiriyat Hamelacha (or 'workers campus') area. "Because my daughter is really afraid of alarms, so I decided to take her out, because we didn't know what was going to happen, you know.. so... So, I said, 'Okay, I will go to Berlin.' So, I went to Berlin, and I started drawing in Berlin."
    The result was 12 small-format paintings of scenes from the day of the Hamas attacks that Cherkassky found in the press and social media of people hiding in shelters, mothers trying to keep their children quiet, and elders taken into captivity.
    Cherkassky's depiction of Oct. 7 are now on display at The Jewish Museum in New York, in the United States. The twelve small works she painted in Berlin went to New York whilst she returned to Tel Aviv on December 1, to start on the bigger renditions.
    The museum director, James Snyder, said visitors were very quiet and reflective when they looked at Cherkassky's striking and bold paintings.
    "To see the way in which they were absorbing what they were seeing and clearly responding to it was something quite moving for us," Snyder said.
    (Production: Aleksandra Michalska, Hussein Al Waaile, Madeleine Stix)
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