Zoya Cherkassky
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Zoya Cherkassky, born 1976
Three of the Ten Plagues, from
Aachen Passover Haggadah, 2001–3
Gouache, watercolor, ink on paper,
27.5 x 40.5
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Purchase, ARTVISION Acquisitions
Committee, Israel
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Among the sources that inspire Kiev-born Zoya Cherkassky are early twentieth-century Russian art and medieval Jewish manuscripts. The pages exhibited here are depictions of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, from her Aachen Passover Haggadah. Some refer explicitly to the work of the revolutionary Russian artist Kasimir Malevich, whose Black Square, 1915, was the epitome of pure abstraction. The violent subject matter of Cherkassky’s illustrations combines with the modernist, minimal style to produce a striking artistic interpretation of the divine acts described in this troubling section of the Haggadah.