Zoya Cherkassky: American Cooking
Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY
Opening: Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 6-8 PM
On View: September 16 – November 7, 2026
“It’s my first year as an American. I [am] trying to understand what it means to arrive somewhere that already feels familiar.” (Zoya Cherkassky)
New York...Fort Gansevoort is pleased to present American Cooking, the gallery's fifth exhibition with Ukrainian-born artist Zoya Cherkassky. Drawn from her experience as a double émigré to the United States, Cherkassky's new paintings and drawings explore ordinary moments and rituals through the eyes of someone encountering a place that feels both familiar and unknown. Long recognized for an assertive figurative style, Cherkassky here transforms scenes of everyday life into deftly executed, psychologically nuanced paintings rooted in social observation. In American Cooking, the artist’s penchant for color, detail and wry humor find new expression through encounters with everyday America.
Cherkassky left her native Ukraine as a teenager and moved to Israel following the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to leave Israel in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks in 2023. She ultimately settled in Long Island, New York, where she now resides. Cherkassky’s latest work reflects her adjustment to life in the United States—an immigrant navigating ideas of identity, belonging, and cultural performance. As she stated in a recent interview, “Everything looks different from the inside.”
The exhibition at Fort Gansevoort takes its title from a vintage cookbook Cherkassky found near her Long Island studio. Intrigued by what struck her “foreigner’s eye” as stilted food photography with strange recipes, she began making small watercolors inspired by the book’s images, thus reconstituting a genre of modern photography that she considers to be a descendant of still life painting. Cherkassky describes these watercolors as part of “an exercise in learning a new language—a way of reading a dictionary, memorizing unfamiliar words, and trying to make sense of a new cultural vocabulary."
Rather than simply documenting her surroundings, Cherkassky uses painting and drawing to mediate between observation and the pursuit of empathy and understanding. As Roger Malbert observed in the survey publication Drawing in the Present Tense (2023), the artist’s work offers "perspectives...more subtle, complicated and penetrating than straight reportage or social commentary. They embody a process of investigation and reflection, of thinking through drawing."
While food serves as a motif across the paintings and drawings on view at Fort Gansevoort, Cherkassky insists that cuisine is not her subject so much as one entry point into a broader investigation of American life. Moving between delicatessens, playgrounds, subway cars, sidewalk tableaux, street markets, and the changing seasons outside her kitchen window, the artist discovers that fleeting moments and overlooked details become clues to expansive and complicated stories. Her canvases reveal a conscious engagement with visual tropes of Americana, drawing equally from observed material culture and the history of American painting as she searches for what she has described as the "nerve of America."
Inspired by the artist's visit to the famous downtown Manhattan delicatessen, Katz’s (2026) captures the frenetic energy of a much-loved institution. The painting is organized around a long line of locals and tourists queuing at the counter, but its true focus is a worker pushing a cart of pickles toward the kitchen. Cherkassky draws the viewer’s attention from a scene of bustle and joy to the requisite labor that often remains unnoticed. By contrast, A Family at the Table (2026) presents an upper-middle-class family gathered for a home-cooked Friday night Shabbos dinner. The scene is marked by quiet restraint as political tensions linger beneath the surface. Amid figures wearing the Magen David (Star of David) and yarmulkes sits one young woman draped in a keffiyeh, the distinctive patterned scarf recognized internationally as a gesture of solidarity with Palestinian resistance. Locating the Israel–Palestine conflict within a domestic setting, Cherkassky frames family dynamics alongside political conflict to suggest that fundamentally human dramas course through life at every level, demanding our willingness to find means of coexistence.
In the highly personal double portrait titled The New American Gothic (2026), Cherkassky and her husband pose in front of their Long Island home in a playful homage to Grant Wood's famous 1930 painting. The pitchfork of Wood’s composition is replaced by a menorah, which is notably held by Cherkassky’s Nigerian husband. At a moment when ideas of American identity are increasingly proscribed and contested, Cherkassky’s image invites reflection on who is included in narratives of “Americanness” and how those narratives continue to evolve.
Building on a practice that has long examined migration, identity, and everyday life, American Cooking further establishes Cherkassky’s distinctive voice in contemporary figurative painting, extending that tradition through artworks that are formally inventive, psychologically astute, and acutely attentive to the social fabric of the present.
About the artist
Zoya Cherkassky was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1976. As a teenager in 1991, she and her family immigrated to Israel. Cherkassky recently relocated to Long Island, New York, where she currently lives and works. She attended HaMidrasha School of Art at Beit Berl College. Her work has been shown internationally at institutions including The Jewish Museum, New York; the Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Heinrich Böll Foundation Gallery, Tel Aviv; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Thaler Originalgrafik, Leipzig; and Guelman Gallery, Moscow. In 2018, the Israel Museum presented the artist's first solo museum exhibition, Pravda. From 2023–24, The Jewish Museum, New York presented the solo exhibition 7 October 2023. Cherkassky's work is held in the permanent collections of the Alexander Library for Jewish Studies, Columbia University; Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art; El Espacio 23; Figge Art Museum; the Israel Museum; The Jewish Museum, New York; the Jewish Museum Berlin; the Jewish Museum Vienna; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the New York Public Library; the North Dakota Museum of Art; the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; the University of Michigan Library; the University of Toronto; and the Weisman Art Museum, among others. Cherkassky is represented by Fort Gansevoort in New York City.
For press inquiries please contact:
Andrea Schwan, Andrea Schwan Inc., andrea@andreaschwan.com, +1 (917) 371-5023
Caption and courtesy information:
Zoya Cherkassky
Katz's, 2026
Oil on linen
55 x 75 in
© Zoya Cherkassky. Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort, New York.