Liorah Tchiprout: The Family Katz

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present _The Family Katz,_ London-based artist Liorah Tchiprout's second solo exhibition with the gallery. In new paintings Tchiprout presents portraits of a fictional Jewish family, the Katzes, and their social circle, based at their home in Gunnersbury Park, London. In these new works, members of Tchiprout's invented coterie are cast from in-person sittings with friends and family, many hailing from London's Jewish community. This marks a new development in the artist's practice, which has formerly been based exclusively on likenesses of artist-made dolls: small, hand-crafted mannequins inspired by both her inner circle, and characters from literature and film. The resultant portraits blur the boundary between the closed-circuit world of Tchiprout's puppets and the dynamism of her living subjects. In _The Family Katz_, Tchiprout considers representations of the Jewish family, across painting and literature, during times of mass migration in the 19th and 20th centuries. She looks to the format of the society portrait, notably John Singer Sargent's paintings of Jewish sitters – affluent London-based families such as the Meyers and the Wertheimers – identifying a tension between earnestness and opulence in these paintings, a reflection of many influential Jewish families of the period finding success in London after fleeing persecution in Europe. Her exhibition title references the 1950 Isaac Bashevis Singer novel _The Family Moskat,_ a complex family saga set in Warsaw in the lead up to World War II. Drawing on Singer's world-building, Tchiprout invokes an implied narrative and familiar history for _The Family Katz_, her affinity with Yiddish literature forming a contextual framework for the character studies. Though fictional, the Katzes bear a particular relation to the artist, named for Tchiprout's great-great-grandfather Joseph Katz who was born in Galicia, Eastern Europe, before moving to Vienna and finally the UK before World War II. The surname Katz is often understood as an acronym of Kohen Tzedek – _righteous priest_ – a name that is solemn due to its religious origin, and familiar in its brevity. The artist's own surname, Tchiprout, bears a parallel resonance. The family, according to oral history, is descended from Hasdai ibn Shaprut, a prominent rabbi, scholar and patron of science, born in 915 in Al Andalus, Spain. In _The Family Katz__,_ the artist's personal relationship to her imaginary subjects develops from a historical one to a mimetic, contemporary one as she situates the family in the West London neighbourhood where she grew up, and recently returned to live and work. Gunnersbury Park is symbolic, being a former home of the prominent Jewish family, the Rothschilds. Continuing the self-referential nature of Tchiprout's practice, her portraits feature glimpses of the Katzes' pets, whippets and greyhounds inspired by her and her family's sighthounds, Fango and Moses, as well as the dogs of her sitters. Nuzzling their way into her compositions, the animals represent the soundless communication of love and duty between family members. With mentions of greyhounds found in the book of proverbs, Tchiprout's focus on the historic breed builds upon the timelessness of her settings and subjects.