Biography
Zuka
(1924, Los Angeles - 2016, Paris)
Zenaida Gurievna Booyakovich was born in Los Angeles in 1924 to Russian parents fleeing the revolution. She meets Joan Mitchell at a very young age and forges a lifelong artistic friendship with her. With Shirley Jaffe, they will form the group of "Three Americans in Paris".
From the end of the 1940s, Zuka moved to Paris "to gain culture" and join the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. She studies the great masters, Braque, Picasso, Matisse, and draws on the history of civilizations and Popular Arts. His marriage to designer Tim accentuates his political commitment and his sensitivity to new social events.
While abstraction dominates the art world on either side of the Atlantic and the work of her two American friends, she develops a very personal figurative painting. Zuka is a pop history painter.
She nevertheless participated in the research of her two friends Joan Mitchell and Shirley Jaffe. Together, they changed the perception of shapes and colors. But Zuka voluntarily wishes to take us beyond abstraction while enriching his palette with the latest pictorial advances. She paints large areas of bright and contrasting colors on her canvases, deposits a mosaic of papers and fabrics in her collages. Beyond the material, Zuka succeeds in a unique, elegant, joyful and humorous writing.
Exhibitions selected
2017 - Lafayette, the crossing of a life - Zuka exhibition, Hèbre Museum, Rochefort
2016 - Amazons of the Revolution, Galerie Françoise Livinec, Paris
2015 - Zuka retrospective, Galerie Françoise Livinec, Paris
2015 - Colorful Cows, Galerie Françoise Livinec, Paris
2008 - The Birds of Zuka, Charlieu Museum
2007 - Retrospective, The old Slaughterhouses, Avallon
2001 - Zuka, Galerie Darthea Speyer, Paris
1989 - La Femme et la Révolution, Mona Bismarck Foundation, Paris and National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.
Collection (selection)
Bank Lambert, Brussels
National Contemporary Art Fund, Paris
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Louisiana State University Museum of Art
Modern art museum of the city of Paris
The Art Collection of the First National Bank of Chicago
