The artist Anna Lukashevsky will be painting and sketching around the city during her message salon embassy artist residency. From her studio in the 25hours Hotel, the artist observes the neighbourhood around Europaallee and Langstrasse, a focal point of the current debate about change and development in the city. Anna Lukashevsky sketches the newly created landscape of Europaallee, which appears empty, cool and futuristic compared to the chaotic everyday life in Tel Aviv. In contrast, Langstrasse, just a few metres away, shows the other side of Zurich: during the day a lively neighbourhood with character and street life, at night the street becomes a noisy consumer and nightlife mile.
In her studio, the artist works with oil paint on several medium-sized canvases at the same time. Some show views of the city, the view from the hotel onto the railway tracks, the concrete architecture and the sky over Zurich. The paintings and sketches, including quick studies of the hotel’s guests and portraits of the crew of hotel employees, will be exhibited in the studio at the end of Anna Lukashevsky’s artist residency.
message salon embassy Zine No. 7, “Europaallee”, Anna Lukashevsky, b/w, edition of 150 copies. © 2017 Anna Lukashevsky & message salon
Anna Lukashevsky was invited to Zurich for the first time by the message salon embassy in 2015. Anna Lukshevsky lives and works in Haifa and Tel Aviv and is a member of the artist group ‘New Barbizon’, a collective of five female painters who were all born in the Soviet Union and emigrated to Israel with their families after its collapse. “New Barbizon” brings figurative painting back into contemporary art. The book just published on the occasion of the first major joint exhibition of ‘New Barbizon’ in Israel is entitled “Back to Live”.