A catalogue essay for “Portrait Time”, a publication by Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, softcover, 80 pages, September 2019

Allison Zuckerman samples elements from past masterpieces of Western culture – always by male artists – and creates a new remix that combines layers of history with a frenzied, up-to-date, contemporary presence. She creates a disrupted jumble of vocabularies, genres and periods, interweaving vividly-colored forms and images like a post-postmodern pastiche on steroids – a motley collage that the viewer is invited to decipher as a secret code. Zuckerman’s women are absurd and exaggerated hybrids, whose body parts are not only ill-matched, but form a wild assemblage of body details in diverse genres and styles, as a statement of presence and activism in the world. Through cannibalization of the styles of the past, she speaks in all languages at the same time and treats history as an inexhaustible data repository from which she draws samples to create a new collage-like entity in a virtual universe.