Zohar Fraiman

Queen of Hearts

Smartphones Everywhere

The work of the painter Zohar Fraiman (b. Jerusalem, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) explores how digital technology influences common gender-specific stereotypes and asks how identities come into being and which mechanisms people use to reconstruct them online on platforms like Instagram, Tinder, and TikTok. Art history meets meme culture, sacred compositions appear side by side with the aesthetics of reality TV, and Botticelli and Caravaggio face off against Instagram poses. Fraiman’s work wittily interrogates the practices of self-dramatization on the internet and grapples with the unnatural forms of self-expression in image-based social networks. Her collage-like painting leaves open whether we are looking at an illusion or reality.

With essays by Larissa Kikol, Pola van den Hövel, and Alicja Schindler, the monograph Queen of Hearts offers an introduction to Zohar Fraiman’s oeuvre.