Description

Hitler expelled all the Jews of Czechoslovakia to the death camps and then cynically set about creating a Jewish museum in Prague to display memorabilia of the Jewish race he had so ruthlessly exterminated. Prague is famous for its astronomical clock installed in 1414 containing an astronomical dial representing Sun and Moon. Its clockwork shows moving sculptures, among them the skeleton figure of Death and a calendar dial that displays a different medallion each month. The Jews of Prague absorbed this sense of time and built a synagogue with two clocks with numbers on their dials marked in Hebrew letters. One clock is square and the different times of the daily prayers. Abigail portrays these at the top of her painting.

In the centre of the work Abigail has painted a mandala, incorporating both earth and sky, that encloses the ancient Jewish cemetery of Prague which contains numerous historical Jewish headstones that have been gathered together and piled there. Souls and seraphs of the murdered and dispersed Czech Jews ascend among giant butterflies outside and within the mandala. Below, on the left, a jug with an Eastern European Jewish motif appears and in the centre there are thistles. To the right Abigail, with the four arms of the Indian goddess Saraswati, is seated in the lotus position holding her paintbrushes. Next to her the peacock of resurrection appears with folded feathers.