A Russian-speaking immigrant to Israel – a “Russian” in the eyes of the locals – faces myriad challenges in the public sphere on a daily basis. It is a never-ending negotiation of identity and belonging, while trying to decipher veteran Israelis’ codes of social conduct. At home, too, the constant struggle of deciphering the Israeli environment continues, another aspect of the plight of a new immigrant. In this exhibition, Zorbova portrays the dynamics at home, in paintings that are about belonging, foreignness, and intimacy. We are introduced to the rooms of the home where she lives with her only daughter, Ester, and are introduced to the backstage of their domestic arrangements. In a relaxed and nonjudgmental style of painting, Zorbova portrays the dynamics between the occupants of the home, who are both women. From time to time, mother and daughter are joined by the grandmother, who occasionally visits from the old country. “Even our cat is a female,” says the artist with a wry smile.
In the works that show Zorbova’s daughter lying or sitting in various poses throughout the house, we see the artist’s struggles with her daughter over house rules and proper etiquette. This struggle is a reflection at once of her experiences as a woman, a mother, a new immigrant, and a professional. The daughter, raised in Israel, is untidy, and her clothes are scattered all around the house. For the artist, this represents a chaotic breakdown of order that undermines her ability to cope.
Zorbova is a member of the New Barbizon group, founded in Israel in 2010 – a group of female artists born in the former Soviet Union. Like the nineteenth-century French school that the group is named after, they, too, seek to use figurative painting from life as a form of critique and an expression of social views. The realism in Zorbova’s works, like that of her fellow colleagues, was initially regarded unfavorably in Israeli art, whose values are different from those of this group of Russian-speaking artists, as outdated and irrelevant. But within the walls of her “fortress,” realism is precisely what gives a “stamp of authenticity” that what her paintings depict is indeed the actual reality.
Each painting illustrates a different aspect of Zorbova’s identity: as mother, painter, or woman seeking her own space, a room of her own. The realistic paintings, with their vivid and bold colors, reflect impressions ranging from foreign to the familiar, moments of belonging and non-belonging, and an attempt to demarcate the boundaries of a safe space.
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