Zoya Cherkassky

Vyacheslav Dmitrovich
and Alexey Eduardovich, 2013,
Oil on canvas, 60×90 cm.
Signed and dated.

To watch a video about Zoya Cherkassky’s works, click here

Zoya Cherkassky is known for her unique painting style, which blends Soviet artistic traditions with contemporary art. Her works deal with subjects such as migration, identity, social and cultural gaps, and the experiences of immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel. She often uses humor and irony to raise political and social issues and provoke critical discourse. Cherkassky’s works have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Israel and around the world, and she has gained international recognition as one of the important and influential artists of her generation.

Her current work focuses on two of her most well-known subjects: the series of museums she presented at the Tel Aviv Museum in 2006, and the Russian immigration series she exhibited at the Israel Museum in 2018. Cherkassky’s paintings delve into the experience of immigration from the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Her art relies on a unique technique that combines a characteristic sense of humor with which she addresses stereotypes about Russian immigrants and touches on controversial topics.

Estimated price: $10,000 - $15,000

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About: Zoya Cherkassky

Zoya was born in Kiev, and as a child she studied at the Central Art School, where her high drawing abilities and figurative style were already prominent. In 1991, she immigrated to Israel with her family and continued her studies at Thelma Yellin High School in Giv'atayim, and later at Beit Berl Academic College. Cherkassky works in many fields in the visual arts, including sculpture painting and illustration. Throughout her career, she has delivered a sharp critique, in her unique way that includes witty humor, on many issues - from the Israeli - religious and cultural establishment, through the art world. She does this by using their own visual symbols and myths. In 2010, together with four other artists, she founded the "New Barbizon" group. With the formation of the group, Cherkassky moved on to do mostly painting and illustration works in the expressive pop art style. This transition included a shift from realistic painting, towards rapid painting work, that matches the world of illustration and satirical cartoons, to which she was exposed as a child in Kiev. In most of her works, the main focus is on interpersonal interactions, which put the viewer in a situation that evokes thought, criticism, and sometimes unpleasantness, combined with humor. Cherkassky has exhibited in dozens of exhibitions, including the solo exhibition "Action Painting" at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2006, an exhibition in which Cherkassky directed half the criticism toward the conduct of the art world. This exhibition has become highly talked about and her works from these years have become very popular and in 2021 the record price for Cherkassy's work was broken when her work from the Action Painting series was sold at an auction of Tiroche at a price 4 times higher than the previous estimates, set at $ 67,000. In 2018, Zoya held an impressive solo exhibition at the Israel Museum, an exhibition that was a place of pilgrimage for art lovers and became the museum's most viewed exhibition. Her works are found among many collections, such as the collection of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York and more. Among the many awards she has won, already in 1999, she won the Young Artist Award from the Israeli Ministry of Science, Culture and Sports, and most recently in 2020 she won the Sandberg Prize for Israeli Art.