70% Chutzpah

In this exhibition, Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer reworks specific historical instances of Jewish persecution into portraits that reclaim and celebrate the collective Jewish body. Therefore, Rosabel combines the biblical with the historical, in an attempt to express how history is so easily mythologized by conspiracy and lies, fueled by racism and discrimination.

The drawings in the exhibition tell a narrative that features the persecutors of mass Jewish genocide, with Hebrew prayers of mourning inscribed on their faces. By injecting Judaic symbolism into classically Christian scenes and compositions, Rosabel redefines traditional biblical mythologies and in so doing honors the unsung Jewish heroes who sacrificed themselves in the name of faith and speaks to the collective memory of her culture.

In contrast, Rosabel also employs the hybrid narrative by expanding the comic format into a wall-sized installation. With humor and cynicism, Rosabel uses drawing as a tool to rejoice in her identity as a Jewish woman in the 21st century.

The title, “70% Chutzpah” refers to the Yiddish proverb that goes: “Jews are 28% fear, 2% sugar, and 70% chutzpah.”
(Chutzpah can be defined as audacity, gall, brazen nerve, and courage.)

Rosabel Rosalind Kurth-Sofer was born in Los Angeles, California, and graduated with a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. In 2018 she began a Combined Study and Research Fulbright Austria Scholarship in Vienna, Austria. With this grant she gained access to the Jewish Museum Vienna’s Schlaff Collection of anti-semitic art and art objects, in order to create a body of work about her own Jewish identity. Her art practice engages self-portraiture as a form of questioning the concept of the self, the feminine and now, the Jewish. This exhibition is a culmination of her project and marks the end of her nine-month-long grant period.