Nelly Zagury is hardly a newcomer to the American arts scene. The Paris-born multidisciplinary artist lived in Brooklyn for five years and Los Angeles for three. She has designed jewelry for Chanel and Boucheron, developed an opera, and her work has been featured in The Fader, I-D (who called her Hoya Faya Jewelry “Brooklyn’s most exciting jewelry brand”) and The New York Times Style Magazine. Her work can currently be seen at Mid City’s Mash Gallery as part of the exhibition “In Her Element, Works by a collection of artists in honor of Womens’ History Month” curated by Haleh Mashian.
“There’s not that many spaces for women to express, and it’s a continuous battle,” Zagury said.
It comes as no surprise that Zagury is an artist. As a child growing up in the suburbs of Paris, some of her best memories were spending hours with her older sister on the dining room table with crayons and paper drawing princesses and cats. She never stopped. And now she’s the first in her family to become a professional artist.
Although she considered studying commercial studies or marketing, those who knew her best encouraged her to go fully into studying art.
At Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin in Strasbourg, France, she worked with many different media. At one point, she thought she’d become an illustrator for children’s stories. Then she fell in love with the jewelry workshop, and studied fashion accessories at Haute Ecole d’Art et de design in Geneva, Switzerland.
Her jewelry landed Zagury in New York, where she worked with filmmaker and artist Matthew Barney. Zagury, a big fan of Barney’s work, and worked alongside him designing costumes for his filmed opera, “River of Fundament.” “I kind of learned everything at that time, and I’m so grateful for that experience. But I felt like I was an artist hiding behind a brand.”
The experience led her to create her own jewelry collection called HOLY FAYA (a play on New Yorkers’ pronunciation of “holy fire”). She created 3D-printed jewelry using bioplastic and gold. After half a decade in New York, Zagury moved to the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles where she’d continue working in costume design.
One thing that always fascinated Zagury during that time is that many of the early theaters in Los Angeles were built by Ashkenazi Jews who also built synagogues. She loves the idea that the diaspora makes traveling a journey of knowledge and culture mix.
But something in her career choices started to feel askew. Zagury identified with the many in the subsets of art that she had pursued. But she didn’t feel like a contemporary artist.
“It took me almost eight years to say, ‘I am an artist.’ First I was like, ‘okay I’m an illustrator. Now, I’m a jewelry designer. Now, I’m an art director. Now, I’m a creative director.’ I was at exhibitions and museum showings and galleries, I would present myself as more related to concrete work or craft. But it took a while for me to say, “I’m a contemporary artist.”
She accepted that drawing is what moved her the most.
“Drawings always keep everything together because it’s my language,” Zagury said. “That’s how I communicate things even better than talking or writing or anything.”
While her American career was flourishing, Zagury had been an expat for eight years and missed her family. So after 3 years in Los Angeles, Zagury went back to France.
“I felt that somehow I needed to get back to my roots,” Zagury said. “And I was also already thinking that if I was moving back to France, I could easily go back to Morocco. I had that in mind, and that’s what happened. At first it overwhelmed me, and then I really met myself again.”
Zagury’s father lived in Morocco until he was 10, and her mother is French with roots in Greece. Her last name “Zagury” comes from the Zagora Desert, located in southeastern Morocco. There was an energy that beckoned her 1,600 miles southwest of Paris to Morocco.
“I had been in this weird mix — in the U.S. I’m seen as a French, but in France, I’m in this eternal identity conflict,” Zagury said. “Coming back [to France] made sense because I had a better understanding of what I was looking for.”
The move also inspired her to retrace the roots of her father’s side of the family in North Africa.
So about two years ago, Zagury visited Morocco’s coastal city of Essaouira. Those in the U.S. who know of Essaouira only know so because it was a hippie town in the 1970s. And before he died in 1970, guitarist Jimi Hendrix considered buying a nearby town. The Essaouira beaches were supposedly the inspiration for his 1967 song, “Castles Made of Sand.”
It was in one of the two Jewish cemeteries in Essaouira where Zagury searched for her great-grandfather’s tomb.. Although she did not find it, she was struck by the beauty of the cemetery. It faced the ocean and was a perfect spot to watch the sunset in the Atlantic breeze.
But it was the tombs at the gravesites themselves that struck Zagury most.
“I had never in my whole life seen tombs like that — like Egyptian tombs — ornaments, drawings and the shadow of a human,” Zagury said. “So I didn’t find my great-grandfather’s tomb because there were so many. It was very overwhelming, but also fantastic because I felt for the first time that I had found the roots of my ancestry. Seeing those tombs reshaped me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the tombs and the design of them.”
Zagury returned to France and researched the art she saw on the tombs at the cemetery, attempting to make sense of the symbols and what they meant. The information she found was scant and unclear, so Zagury got back in her element with a paintbrush in hand and canvas in front of her, to make sense of it. She would turn what she saw at the cemetery into a work to celebrate womanhood and resilience.
“I see that resilience as inherent in our condition, because we [as women] go through cycles,” Zagury said. “So as women, you’re connected to the elements. You die every month and you rebirth from it. I wanted to use reincarnation. So how do I talk about life and death and the afterlife and the cycles? So I got interested in Egyptian ancient mythology. I was geeking on that crazily, the biblical archeology.”
And that is where her paintings “Blue Lotus” and “Venus of the Nile” (featured in the Mash Gallery show) came from. They’re both brightly colored acrylic paintings on linen, with gold, mother of pearl and Essaouira blue pigments sourced from Morocco.
“Blue Lotus” incorporates Egyptian mythology, reincarnation and Kabbalistic philosophy.
It appears to be a woman stepping away from a tomb and becoming a flower, surrounded by palm trees and with bright desert colors.
“I wanted to talk about human resilience,” Zagury said about ‘Blue Lotus.’ “Here you have a direct expression: the tomb becoming a woman, which is becoming a flower. It’s a full cycle.”
“Venus of the Nile” evokes reincarnation imagery as well. There appears to be a mermaid on a boat made of papyrus and her own scales.
“So this idea that the soul travels and that you can reincarnate like anything, like a stone, the water, a flower,” Zagury said of ‘Venus of the Nile.’ “So this is a woman on a solo boat going to the desert world. She’s in between life and death.”
In both paintings, Zagury links to Egyptian imagery. The lotus flower was used as an aphrodisiac and a narcotic. And they were plentiful along the fertile farmlands around the Nile River. The lotus is also a symbol of resilience for it grows out of muddy waters, opens its petals during the day for the sun, and then closes at night.
The Journal asked Zagury about what rebirth means in the context of her own journey as an artist. She described the mix of the history of France and its former colonies, as well as the Jewish diaspora and Muslim diaspora in North Africa.
“There is a need right now for my generation to go back to [their roots in North Africa] so I feel that I’m part of it,” Zagury said. But it’s a very global movement and it’s very beautiful to see that as second generation in France, a lot of Jews from Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, we want to go back and explore now that we realize that we’ve been living in between a lot of shadows.”
Nelly Zagury’s art can be seen through April 8th at the Mash Gallery, as part of the “In Her Element” exhibition: 812 N. La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90069
To learn more about Zagury’s visit her website https://nellyzagury.eu and follow her Instagram: www.instagram.com/nellyzagury.
