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As her work has come to prominence over the last two decades, her sarcastic, painfully honest style has been both lauded and condemned for its unflattering picture of Israeli society’s treatment of Soviet immigrants. Cherkassky-Nnadi came to Israel as a teenager with her family from Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1991. While Women Who Work marks the first time she has dealt extensively with sex work, the paintings continue her examination of the friction between marginalized communities and the hegemonic majority. These paintings represent both a departure from and a deepening of Cherkassky-Nnadi’s ongoing project. With characteristic candor, Cherkassky-Nnadi captures moments of routine violence and glimpses of friendship and solidarity between women making a life on the margins. In Arrest of the Pimp, a group of distraught women sits on a couch as a policeman holds a man lying face down on the rug at gunpoint. American Boy, I Will Run Away with You shows a nude karaoke party, in which one woman stands on a table belting Estelle’s 2008 pop hit “American Boy” while a couple has sex beneath her.

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Recently exhibited online by Fort Gansevoort Gallery in a show called Women Who Work, which closed last October, the series of more than 50 mixed media works on paper employs Cherkassky-Nnadi’s signature bright colors and bold lines, combining the idealist aesthetics of Soviet Realism and the exuberance of comics. The portrait, Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass)-conceived as a reconfiguration of Édouard Manet’s controversial 19th-century study of the female body-is part of post-Soviet Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi’s in-depth exploration of the daily lives of sex workers. For a portrait of idyllic debauchery, it’s strangely passionless, focused on the mechanical unfolding of the sex acts, set comically against the meadow’s tranquility. Two of the women’s faces are covered or turned away, while the other stares blankly into the eyes of the man penetrating her. While one woman removes her underwear, two others are already entangled with a trio of expressionless men. Its participants surround a white blanket, where they’ve abandoned their picnic: Tomatoes and cucumbers lay strewn beside a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, and a jar of pickles juts out of an open Adidas bag.

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