Esther P. Zibell is a French born artist who is mostly self-taught and has been painting since her early childhood. In the eighties she became an observant Jew and dedicated her work to Biblical and Hassidic themes imbued with her sensitivity and talent. Esther has exhibited her work internationally in: Paris and the Cote D’Azur, France; Montreal, Canada; New York City and Brooklyn, NY; Jerusalem and Tzefat, Israel. Esther spent nineteen years in Brooklyn, NY. While there, she studied print-making at the Art Student’s League of New York. In June 2016 she made Aliya with her husband to Tzefat, Israel, where they presently live in the Old City’s Artist Quarter. Esther has spent much of her life dedicated to art; employing her imagination, sensitivity and originality, she has developed a style uniquely her own.
Artist’s Statement
I started painting when I was 3 years old and I have never stopped since. As a self-taught artist, my goal has always been to keep a pure and emotional connection with my subject, and to communicate this sense of wonder to my viewers. An important part of my work is Jewish themes, but it is not “Judaic Art”. I try to go beyond the description, and touch the soul and essence of the event. I think that whatever I create, whether I paint flowers or do print making, the goal is essentially the same: to bring people deeper into the subject, and maybe, even allow them to feel the Divine within it.
Selections about Esther P. Zibell
by David Sears, Author
The subjects of Esther Zibell’s paintings and prints range from landscapes, to still life, to portraits, to biblical and family scenes. There are even a few cosmic visions populated by birds and psychedelic ginkgo leaves. But like all artists, her true subject is her own inner world. That world is charged with empathy and love, a deep Jewish consciousness, closeness to nature, and a joyous connection to her own womanhood, especially as expressed through portraits of women young and old, wedding scenes, and mothers and children.
Her art strikes the American eye as very French—which reflects her upbringing and formative years in Paris, and the early modernist embrace of folk themes by French artists such as Matisse, Redon, Chagall, Soutine and others. Somehow Esther Zibell has preserved the secret wellsprings of innocence with her art, even in her Holocaust paintings and contemplations of aging and loneliness. Her Jewish subjects are richly expressive of her love for the Jewish people, past and present; the otherworldly aura of the Sabbath; and her symbolist conceptions of biblical stories, ever from a woman’s point of view.
Although Jewish visual art is thankfully alive and well today, Zibell contributes a vitality and ingenuousness that is immediately recognizable as her own. It is an art that envisions Jewish life through a spiritual lens, with something best expressed in her native tongue, “joie de vivre.” by Zev Markowitz, Director Chassidic Art Institute Self-taught, steeped in the long tradition of European Art, Esther Zibell is an insider, depicting for us her own world in a very universal manner. A soulful body of work; a way of life, lovingly revealed.
by Richard McBee, Writer
The work of Esther P. Zibell… offers a sentimental, witty and intimate glimpse of Orthodox life around the world. One of my favorite examples is Safed’s Cats depicting no less than 13 black cats hungrily watching a Hassid barbecuing by the moonlight in his Safed backyard. Unique of its kind.