WATCH OUT #6: Katharina Schilling on Zohar Fraiman

WATCH OUT is an ongoing series in which curators present emerging artists who they find exciting. Selected by Yvonne Scheja.

I am a fan of the Berlin-based Israeli artist Zohar Fraiman (*1987 in Jerusalem, Israel). With great painterly skill, she shows all the absurdities of our busy lives and their dependence on digital devices. Her large-format candy-coloured paintings, tellingly titled "Phones Eat First" (2023) or "Clock, Work, Orange" (2022), function like memes that present a new popular culture of snippets, references and copies beneath the surface of supposed nonsense.

By dealing with the images of digital communication in a painterly way, of all things, she sets new impulses for one of the oldest genres in art history. She composes multi-headed and multi-armed figures from social media motifs, advertisements, art historical references and film stills, which sometimes appear as if the camera had malfunctioned at the moment of shooting, so that several images had been superimposed or one photo had been exposed for a long time. As a consequence, the depicted persons cannot be clearly classified into conventional gender stereotypes and identities. They are glitched fantasy figures that evoke moments of irritation when the sampled original is recognised: Doesn't the figure come from an Old Master painting? Is the scene depicted an adapted film still? Doesn't the female figure depicted remind me of Botticelli's Primavera or Britney Spears? We are immersed in the colourful world of pop culture, where iconic characters from Disney films sit opposite pop stars staring glumly into their smartphones, holding up a mirror to us. Great!

About Katharina Schilling

Katharina Schilling is curator and current director of Kunstverein Haus am Lützowplatz. Since completing her studies in art history, she has curated numerous exhibitions, mostly for the association, such as those by Birgit Brenner (2009) and Jim Avignon (2011) as well as the group exhibitions "Habseligkeiten" (2016), "never mind the burnout" (2022) and "Back to the Future" (2023). Their exhibition projects always relate to social reality and focus on virulent socio-political issues.