In her new exhibition at Kunstpalais in Germany, the Israeli artist continues to question female identity under the influence of social networks. Her figurative oil works playfully combine art history and popular culture.
Since the beginning of her career, Zohar Fraiman has explored the effects of the digital age on identity through the various mechanisms that are constructed on social platforms, from Instagram to TikTok, Snapchat and Tinder. With humor and irony, the 38-year-old Jerusalem-born, Berlin-based artist questions "the staging of the self on the Internet", and confronts the thousand and one whimsical ways in which we display and express ourselves.
The "You-phoria" exhibition at Kunstpalais, the museum of contemporary art in the German city of Erlangen, presents his Game of Phones series , echoing HBO's fantasy epic Game of Thrones . But here, smartphones take over and become objects of desire.
Distraction portal
Zohar Fraiman's oil paintings are figurative collages, shimmering and humorous, drawing on art history and cultural imagery. As in her previous series, here she reappropriates the moods and emotional states conveyed on social networks to create visual narratives where the mysterious and dreamlike compete with the absurd.
His pictorial works skilfully blend "mannerism and surrealism" with digital tools and outrageous filters. All refer to painters from the history of art (Botticelli, Balthus, Giotto, Modigliani), animated Disney characters (Alice, Cinderella, Mulan), TV series(The Simpsons, Gossip Girl) and celebrities (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Bella Hadid).
The protagonists she brings to life and stages are confronted with the vile law of appearance and the perception of others. " The cosmos she creates in her paintings is not there to reflect our world, but to show parallel realities that exist because of the revelation of ourselves in the age of social media", says the museum institution.
Illusory belief and reality
These women, grappling with their being and their appearance, surround themselves with fictitious or virtual characters, often metamorphosing themselves into strange figures and silhouettes. Not a single one seems able to escape this complex, prefabricated parallel universe of consumerist society, devoted and submissive to her smartphone. Submerged in vivid colors, Zohar Fraiman's works never cease to underline the increasingly distorted diktats of beauty, and the increasingly exacerbated drift of filters.
This blurs the boundaries between digital and analog, fiction and reality, real and fake. She plays with existing trends (make-up tutorials, mukbang, foodporn, images of cats everywhere, still life), changing and fusing the faces and bodies of her protagonists with glitch effects and other image juxtapositions. These modern scenes of everyday life are transformed and distorted, gradually melting into cartoon, painting and drawing.
Zohar Fraiman skilfully probes the growing paradox of self-objectification and interchangeability, flirting with the tragicomedy of existence 5.0, where all these protagonists play with pretense until they lose themselves in their multiple versions of themselves.
"Zohar Fraiman. You-phoria "
Kunstpalais
Erlangen Museum of Contemporary Art
May 17 to September 28, 2025
