Milka Cizik (1937 – 2011) – Back Home

The exhibition commemorates artist Milka Cizik, who passed away four years ago. Milka was a vivacious Jerusalemite and a legendary teacher who has taught countless students at the departments of art, graphic design and industrial design at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design for nearly four decades.

The current exhibition marks Milka’s final homecoming – to The Jerusalem Artists’ House (located not far from her own home), where she held a good few exhibitions throughout her career, and where she also taught for many years. It showcases a modest selection from her oeuvre, of prints mostly, produced in the earlier part of her career. The event is therefore another act of a return home and closure.

Milka’s artwork foregrounds the bizarre, embodied by either a particular figure or by an entire scene, which is deterring and threatening as much as it is alluring and intriguing. Its presence invokes the ubiquitous use of blindness in theatre and drama, as the state granting exclusive access to the truth. Similarly, Milka’s art (on the creatures, animals and dolls it features) evinces emotional reactions to the human condition that derive from her art’s unpredictable peculiarity.

Milka commented on this aspect of her work:

“I experience the existing world.
There is no need to create it anew.
Artistic creation offers the unique opportunity of creating a world that cannot exist otherwise. As opposed to dreams, it is the exclusive means for creating situations that despite their derivation from the existing world cannot be experienced, but somehow be perceived through the senses, through perception.”