During her artist residency, Israeli artist Anna Lukashevsky is painting and drawing around the city, accompanied by her painter friend Maria Pomiansky from Zurich. Anna Lukashevsky sketches the newly created, gentrified landscape of Europaallee, which, compared to the chaotic everyday life in Tel Aviv, appears empty, cool and futuristic to her. In contrast, Langstrasse, just a few metres away, shows the other side of Zurich. During the day, it is a neighbourhood with character and street life, but at night the street becomes a noisy consumer and nightlife mile with red lights.
Anna Lukashevsky was first invited to Zurich by message salon embassy in 2015. The artist lives and works in Haifa and Tel Aviv. Anna Lukashevsky and Maria Pomiansky are members of the Israeli artists’ group New Barbizon. The painters are bringing figurative painting back into contemporary art. The book, which has just been published to mark New Barbizon’s first major joint exhibition in Israel, is entitled “Back to Live”.
In the hotel studio, the artist works with oil paints on several medium-sized canvases simultaneously. The paintings depict cityscapes or the view from the hotel onto the railway tracks, the concrete architecture and the sky above Zurich. The paintings and sketches, including quick studies of hotel guests and portraits of hotel employees, are exhibited in the hotel studio at the end of the project, and a zine is published.
message salon embassy Zine No. 7, “Europaallee” Anna Lukashevsky, b/w, edition of 150 copies. © 2017 Anna Lukashevsky & message salon