In her new exhibition at the Kunstpalais in Germany, the Israeli artist continues to explore female identity under the influence of social media. Her figurative oil paintings boldly combine art history and popular culture.
Since the beginning of his career, Zohar Fraiman has explored the effects of the digital age on identity through the various mechanisms constructed on social media platforms, from Instagram to TikTok, including Snapchat and Tinder. With humor and a touch of irony, the 38-year-old artist, originally from Jerusalem and now based in Berlin, questions "the staging of self on the internet" and confronts the myriad quirky and whimsical ways of exhibiting and expressing oneself.
The exhibition "You-phoria" at the Kunstpalais, the contemporary art museum in the German city of Erlangen, presents his series Game of Phones, echoing the fantastic epic Game of Thrones from HBO. But here, smartphones take over and become objects of all desire.
Distraction portal
Zohar Fraiman's oil paintings are figurative, shimmering, and humorous collages, drawing on art history and cultural imagery. As in her previous series, she reappropriates the moods and emotional states conveyed on social media to create visual narratives where mystery and dreamlike imagery vie with the absurd.
Her pictorial works skillfully blend "mannerism and surrealism" with digital tools and the excess of filters. All of them reference painters from art history (Botticelli, Balthus, Giotto, Modigliani), Disney animated characters (Alice, Cinderella, Mulan), and television series (The Simpsons, Gossip Girl) or even to celebrities (Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Bella Hadid).
These protagonists, whom she brings to life and stages, are thus 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."the museum institution specifies.
Illusory belief and reality
These women, grappling with their inner selves and their appearance, surround themselves with fictional or virtual characters, often transforming themselves into strange figures and silhouettes. Not one seems able to escape this complex and prefabricated parallel universe of consumer society, devoted to and subjugated by its smartphone. Zohar Fraiman's works, awash in vibrant colors, relentlessly underscore the increasingly distorted dictates of beauty and the ever-increasing excesses of filters.
The boundaries blur between digital and analog, fiction and reality, true and false. She plays with existing trends (makeup tutorials, mukbang, food porn, cat images everywhere, still life), altering and merging the faces and bodies of her protagonists with glitch effects and other image juxtapositions. These modern scenes of everyday life transform and distort, gradually merging into cartoons, paintings, and drawings.
Zohar Fraiman skillfully probes the growing paradox of self-objectification and interchangeability, flirting with the tragicomedy of existence 5.0 where all these protagonists play with appearances until they lose themselves in their multiple versions of themselves.
“Zohar Fraiman. You-phoria »
Art Palace
Museum of Contemporary Art of the City of Erlangen
From 17 May to 28 September 2025
