Asya Lukin burst onto the Israeli art scene over 10 years ago riding the wave of the New Barbizon group: five women from the former Soviet Union who came of age as painters in Israel. The original members of this collective undertook the ambitious endeavor of painting an array of Israeli social and urban landscapes. They achieved broad acclaim, culminating in the 2017 exhibition New Barbizon: Back to Life, curated by Yaniv Shapira at the Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod.
Among their many accomplishments, these émigré painters demonstrated that art could be authentically Israeli without taking an overt stance on local politics. They showed that visually rich depictions of poor neighborhoods could be as meaningful, and at least as compelling, as the “scarcity of material” aesthetic championed by previous generations.
As with all consequential tides, debris gets mixed in with the refreshing flow. Alongside many wondrous pieces come along haphazard works that rely on easily recognizable scenery with local flavor, rather than on visual refinement.
Lukin never made this compromise. For a mix of personal and professional reasons, she left the New Barbizon group and disappeared from the public eye.
Her work has just reemerged for broad attention in a current exhibition at Rothschild Fine Art Gallery in Tel Aviv. Lukin rejoins forces and visions with curator Shapira for her first public exposure since 2018.
What the exhibition shows
The exhibition showcases a vast series of small-scale works on paper in acrylic and tempera, alongside larger oil paintings and a handful of sculptures. All the pieces revolve around a single theme: hospital life. Fading or recovering patients and loving or reluctant visitors of all ages and social strata populate Lukin’s works.
Like many New Barbizon paintings, Lukin’s new pieces emerge from observing mundane, local realities and possess a measure of caricature-like qualities. The paintings tell stories we can easily grasp. We recognize the hospital interiors, human types, and interactions that may be painful or comical – and, in most cases, both at once.
Each work is a snapshot of life hinting at a wider story that keeps unfolding in our imagination, beyond the captured images. The series as a whole feels like a film composed of multiple vignettes, each with its own plot and cast of characters, contributing to a larger narrative that transcends isolated pieces. This overarching vision connecting diverse stories elevates Lukin’s oeuvre beyond the depiction of social stereotypes, beyond the recognizable setting, and beyond any particular artistic movement.
It is the drama of human vulnerability that unfolds across Lukin’s works. It takes a measure of skill to paint human figures and their interactions. To charge the figures with palpable emotional content requires mastery of another order. The painted narratives are to be felt rather than merely recognized.
The paintings not only make us witness the laconic documentation of social exchanges in uneasy circumstances; as we look at the works, they also expose us to the vulnerability and weakness of the bodies and the strength of emotional bonds.
The finest of Lukin’s works transcends the mundane and transitory scenes to attain a timeless quality. The hospital patients she paints may die or recover, only to be replaced by new ones, while the pain and hope she expresses remain constant. But it is not the pain that the paintings extend into perpetuity. Rather, it is the empathetic observation and the overcoming of pain through aesthetics.