A Living-Dead Flower

For the past ten years, Zehava Masser has been engaged with the image of a small flower within an empty space. A slender, fragile-looking flower, devoid of leaves and roots, it is not in its natural place in the ground; rather, it is sunken into a hard, heavy surface that looks like plaster or processed concrete.

The small flower does not fight for its existence. It has a minor presence, a shadow of itself, as if it were fossilized into eternal sleep, like a living-dead. Its appearance conveys a freezing sense of alienation and solitude.

It is neither graceful nor does it boast a colorful inflorescence. Bees are not likely to seek nectar in it. It has no name, no title, and it cannot be found in a conventional plant guide. It looks like an allusion to a flower, any flower. It operates on our consciousness as the memory of a flower or memory flower. At times it looks like a memorial candle.

Countless times, meditatively, Zehava Masser has rendered this small flower in a large void or within a closed container from which there is no way out. Initally, the depiction was expressive, typified by an emotional outburst, strong colors, and an abstract orientation. In the course of time, however, as the preoccupation with the small flower became more intense, intimate and obsessive, she gradually withdrew into herself. Her mode of expression became frugal and minimalist. Her color gamut likewise diminished, until it was reduced to a monochromatic scale consisting of ocher-brown hues.

The works have gained an archaeological flavor. They conceal more than they reveal, bearing traces of a highly-charged past, of times when the flower was made of rusty, pitted metal that had seen better days. Masser collects these metal scraps in building sites or on the beach. The more rusty and crumpling they are, the more infused with “a past” and marked by the ravages of time, the greater their chances to be integrated into her works. The surface in which the flower is embedded is akin to an ancient, multi-layered piece of wall. At times she fixes the rusty tin flower to a long, narrow surface reminiscent of a vitrine in a historical museum or alternatively – of a sarcophagus.

The fossilized flower is a metaphor for man as a tree of the field, alluding to human transience and detachment. Masser has an ambivalent, intricate relationship with the ephemerality it represents. She carries a heavy spiritual burden with her that she cannot unload: the scar of a second generation to Holocaust refugees. Her father was an officer in the Czech army who survived the Nazi regime thanks to his mastery of many languages. Zehava Masser, however, was mainly influenced by her mother, who was transferred from one camp to another, and survived Auschwitz. Zehava was raised on her mother’s chronicles, feeling profound identification with her mother’s past and with the accompanying emotional wounds.

The stories of death and survival, and mainly those feelings of transience and vulnerability, have also permeated her works. They led her to the family album from which she extracted an old photograph featuring her at the age of two with her parents – the classical photograph of a young, happy family. After enlarging the image and transforming it into a life-sized painting, she started manipulating it, erasing and concealing its details, until she finally focused on her own figure as a young girl. She then performed a figure- and role-reversal. She replaced her own figure with that of her mother as a child, as if attempting to remove the emotional burden of her mother’s past, and take it upon herself.

Ten years ago, that painted Holocaust girl was replaced by the small flower. Masser planted it instead of her figure in the same composition, it the same painterly structure. Ever since then she has persistently and repeatedly perpetuated it over the years. A frugal-looking flower, a survivor, sunken like a fossil in a large surface of dry clay or imprisoned within an oxygen-less box; a terribly delicate flower.

“Beauty Cannot Protect Us”, Masser once entitled one of her paintings. This is also the motto of her current ghost garden.

Ilan Nachshon