Mina Kupfermann
Home Publications Exhibitions AboutHow should art respond to horror?
Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) remains one of the greatest artistic testimonies against horror, a crying response to a cruel massacre. But even back then, reports would distort the nature of that horror, that Basque socialists were responsible for the destruction of their own town - an outright lie - and not the German and Italian air forces at the request of General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. How would Picasso, who wasn't there to witness what happened, compete with this warring news and convey truth through the power of art?
The struggle between the interior world of the artist and the real-world accounts of the slaughter and horror that took place on Israeli land on 7th October 2023 is at the core of Mina Kupfermann's exhibition of recent paintings, drawings and installations. Her art is an act of witness, not by re-presenting the barbaric killings that took the lives of more than 1,200 Jews and non-Jews on that day. History will record that day as the most deadly massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Rather her work is a transcendence of that real and utter horror brought down upon innocent civilians by Islamist terrorist groups Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terror cells.
Kupfermann takes inspiration from Marc Chagall, Pierre Bonnard, Jean-Édouard Vuillard, Frank Auerbach, the triptych form of Christian art from the middle ages and Orphism. Her aesthetic is eclectic, unnaturalistic, non-realist. Her recent works from 2024-2025 are mainly artistic responses to the massacre of over 360 young people and 40 abducted by Hamas at the Nova Music Festival in the semi-desert region of Negev, southern Israel. Rather than depict the unbearable, in Nova (2024) Kupfermann imagines these young souls as abstracted, ethereal beings, in harmony and fused with a mythic indeterminate landscape, like spirits of the land. The soft white, pink-blue tones of the figures lend them an air of translucency, a floating lightness of being, a transcendence from the real-life atrocities they faced; we will dance again.
Spring at Kibbutz Be'eri (2024) is a meditative, magical painting, swirling with floral beauty, we again see an indeterminate figure, in solitude merging with the surroundings, lost in a book. Kibbutz Be'eri was another site of terror when Hamas invaded, over 100 kibbutzniks massacred, homes razed to cinders. The pain of reality is too recent, too traumatic, too hard to bear. The work Kupfermann has created is a re-imagined land, hinting at renewal, regrowth, spiritual presence and hope.
Her most recent piece, Triptych (2025) re-imagines the medieval Christian artform of painting on three wooden panels. In lieu of religious icons, Kupfermann depicts Shani Louk and Keshet Casarotti-Kalfa on the left and right panels, respectively. Both were ebullient young souls, brutally murdered by Hamas. The two secular, peaceful, fun-loving cosmopolitan Israelis have become deities of freedom; the large orb in the centre panel glows over a dark world, hinting that good will prevail over evil. Kupfermann has also painted on the backs of the two side panels, what appears to be a twisted labyrinth of copper pipes, like the guts of an old gas or steam boiler or engine room. The associations conjured are uncomfortable...gas chambers, gaslighting, the influencing machine of propaganda? Kupfermann's father was a renowned expressionist painter, Jacques Kupfermann (1926-1987) who fled Vienna, Austria in 1940 for the USA at the age of 13 years old, alone. His parents were deported to Minsk in Belarus and killed by the Germans. History replays itself in 2023.
The artist's earlier works from 2016-2017 are simultaneously abstracted and more representational than her current work. Her elephant series show powerful, majestic real creatures, but they are also mythical creatures, possessing potent powers in a pantheistic world. Elephants are not only attacked by other beasts but also by man, for their ivory tusks, skin and meat.
The drawings and paintings featured in the exhibition could arguably be metaphors, symbols of the Jewish experience throughout history; peaceful, strong, powerful, hunted, endangered.
"We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere." Primo Levi
Text by Manick Govinda, Co-curator, WITNESS exhibition, JW3, London, March/April 2025, commissioned by the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.