If you don't know the name Zoya Cherkassky, chances are you've actually already come across her work. It's hard to miss: colorful, figurative and direct, with a painterly language that over the years became almost instantly identified with her.

Zoya is one of the most prominent artists in contemporary Israeli art, and she paints mainly what is right around her: people, family, food, class, culture and identity. At first glance her paintings can look almost naive, amusing or everyday, but behind the color and the humor there is usually a sharp, complex and at times merciless gaze at society, at stereotypes, and at the places where cultures and identities meet and collide.

Zoya was born in Kyiv and immigrated to Israel as a teenager in 1991. The experience of immigration, and the sense of being at once part of a culture and also observing it a little from the outside, became a motif that recurs again and again in her work.

After October 7 Zoya moved with her family to the US, and today she lives and works in Long Island. Almost 35 years after she immigrated to Israel, she finds herself once again in a new place, and once again in the position so familiar to her: inside and outside at the same time, observing the society around her and trying to decipher it.

This is exactly the point of view she brings to her new exhibition in New York, American Cooking, which opens on September 16.

This time, American life enters her paintings through one of the most everyday things there is: food. Meals, family and social rituals become a way to look at America and try to understand it. Among the works in the exhibition are Katz’s Delicatessen and images born out of an old American cookbook she found near her studio in Long Island.

📍 Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York
📅 September 16 to November 7, 2026
🥂 Opening: September 16, 6 to 8 PM