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W i l d A n g e l s Fiendish Angels: Nogah Engler Hava Aldouby The exhibition Wild Angels is a continuation of Nogah Engler’s excursion into European culture and landscapes, which she explores with a fascination mixed with fear. Her journey resonates with dark moments in history, while she remains acutely aware of the ominousness of the present. In her earlier series of works, Barbarian in the Garden (2018), Engler addressed Europe’s canonical high culture, which is losing its hegemony as we speak. The series Uplift (2020) signals a shift of focus in the artist’s work, to a pre-modern Ukrainian folk culture rooted in paganism, predating Europe’s Christian era. The key image at the center of the series is a winged human figure adorned with flowers, which recalls a folk tradition involving a yearly carnival which originated in Engler’s father’s home region of the Ukraine, and is still celebrated to this day. The artist approaches the carnival with a mixture of curiosity, attraction, and recoil, for it is in the forests of the Ukraine that her father survived the Holocaust as a young child. The lively and colorful festival, which nowadays is a tourist attraction, seems to harbor a dark and violent potential in its human/animal hybrids and echoes of pagan rites. Uplift thus addresses pre-modern European folklore with a mixture of attraction and dread. Engler filters the imagery of carnival through post-traumatic memory, rooted in both her private heritage and collective history. A devastating gust of wind has shattered the world in the historic period invoked in Engler's works, transforming the familiar landscape into deadly territory. Engler’s paintings evince a yearning towards the culture and landscape that had nourished her own heritage, while lending resonance to the present moment, as mass immigration seems to be on the verge of shattering Europe’s cultural and political hegemony. The biographical-historical tangle undergirding Engler’s series is epitomized in the hybrid winged figure. In a number of paintings, this figure, be it angel or demon, bears the generic features of a middle-aged Slavic man. Engler depicts this figure time and again, in thin, transparent layers of oil paint; yet she appears to maintain a safe distance. Applying the diluted paint carefully with her brush, she invokes transparent, disembodied angels, which transmit the forces of either healing or destruction. The figures