National Art Museum of the Rubublic of Belarus

Melodies of Spring

The Israel Centre for Culture and Information
under the Embassy of Israel in the Republic of Belarus presents
the Exhibition of Israel painter Malka Cenciper
(copies of a print (“zhikle”) on the canvas)

Malka Cenciper – a winner of the Moscow International Art Festival III “Traditions and Modernity” in the following category: “For Unique National Identity”.
Malka Cenciper uses diverging artistic genres, techniques and materials, masterly combining reality with abstraction. Malka’s painting, graphics and sculpture is devoted to one large-scale Jewish theme, where motives of humour and love are mainly highlighted in spite of the great diversity of her creative work. Her central and favourite characters are the habitants of a Jewish borough.
Malka Cenciper was born in Vilnius in 1947; in 1966 she together with her family was repatriated to Israel. She was graduated from the University of Haifa, the Department of Mathematics, and later – the University of Jerusalem, the Musicological Branch. She has been working as a programmer for 20 years. At the same time she began to study painting and sculpture: at first – at the Jerusalem Museum and in the Municipal Art Centre, and later – in the studios of well-known Jewish artists and sculptors. In 1997 Malka Cenciper has eventually decided to devote herself to art.
Bright, colourful, noisy world of Malka Cenciper’s heroes is joyful and poeticized; it is the world of a Jewish borough, full of love and happiness. Weddings are being celebrated, couples are twirling around the dance floor, sweethearts are kissing, musicians (“Klezmers” from Yiddish) are dashingly playing the musical instruments, and fairies are dancing around on her canvas. Her characters become alive under the splashes of colours and lead their own full-blooded lives.
Nowadays her works of art are famous both in Israel and abroad – in the USA, Mexico, Greece, Spain, France and other countries. She is being regularly exhibited in Galleries of Israel, and she is a frequent participant of Co-Exhibitions, among which one cannot but single out several exhibitions in the USA and France as well as the Exhibition, devoted to the 60th Anniversary of the Republic of Israel. Her personal exhibitions have been organized in different Galleries of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa.
“I admire heroes of my paintings. They become alive under the splashes of colours, they are smiling with the tips of brushes and lead their own full-blooded lives, involving me into their love stories, honeymoons and jolly parties, – Malka Cenciper sais. – The music of the place, the atmosphere of the far provinces, a remote place of Eastern Europe are the images of my works of art, combined with the help of a general subject of fantasy, humour and the Jewish way of life. These are those boroughs and villages, so colourfully and brightly described by the writer Sholem-Aleichem: with a lot of noise, clamour, frequent revelry and poorly hidden melancholy…”