Wild Exaggeration

Ada Ovadia

Ada Ovadia's expressive and grotesque paintings simultaneously feature a unique outlook on reality as well as poignant social consciousness and a rage against injustice and racism. She creates painting and drawing series out of a sense of great urgency, and executes them on a great variety of ready surfaces. The figures she draws have no identity; they recur in endless variation, and they all give off a sense of marginality, alienation and horror. Their backgrounds and accompanying iconography - the Twin Towers, a snow-capped landscape, the Eiffel Tower and upturned boats - link the figures to the Postcolonial discourse as well as to narratives of immigration, persecution and racism. Ovadia sharply criticizes the hypocrisy of Western enticement with the "wild" beauty of the "primitive" and the excesses of Capitalism, which safeguards that its others are perpetually embroiled in a never-ending cycle of exile and global otherness. Besides these themes, her work also heavily features allusions to the Holocaust, mainly through the image of the yellow Star of David and a recurring iteration of Hitler's famous mustache - another instance of racism. Ovadia's figures might look monstrous at times, but she does not ridicule them, trying, in her own words, to make us identify with them. Sometimes it seems that her body and soul have been sucked into these figures, that they were created as alter-ego representations in a merciless world.

Born in Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael, 1966; lives and works in Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael