“Phantoms 2020,” A Tel Aviv Series On War And Polarization By Artist Lela Migirov

On display at the Artists’ House in Tel Aviv, Lela Migirov created the series “Phantoms 2020” during the isolation brought by the Coronavirus pandemic.

Social isolation during this global pandemic have brought Lela to an artistic consciousness that expresses her desperate protest against the horror that every war brings. The situation around current plague has awakened in Lela’ mind the memory of outstanding human suffering during World War II.

Lela paints in relatively small formats on canvas in saturated and compressed colors. She said: “I tried to put complexity and a storm of emotions into a small place called canvas.”

The images have been minded on the canvases look like anonymous stains. Naked souls being given mostly biblical names, exemplary figures symbolizing conflicts from the dawn of human history like Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Ishmael, alongside extermination camp names like Treblinka, Dachau and Sobibor. The artist meant to say that human nature from the beginning is made up of polarity that can lead to disaster if we do not know how to curb it.

Lela’s phantoms are usually painted in white and evoke compassion and pain, a reminder of the past and what may be in the future. In her opinion, the 20th century was one of the most difficult centuries in the history of mankind and what is frightening is the moral deterioration that led to the destruction of the masses, precisely on a seemingly cultural continent. It seems like in these days, in the 21st century, the probability of the danger that past horrors will happen again has taken off from zero.

Lela’s anxieties and insights are displayed on the presented canvases. She seeks to express intellectual artistic depth and asks “What will happen to humanity that cannot reach the bottom of its roots or its origins?”

Curator of the exhibition: Arie Berkowitz

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