Image: Zemack Contemporary Art, West Palm Beach
Sara Arsenyuk will present her new solo exhibition, 'The Planets Go Wild', at Zemack Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv from September 3 through October 16, 2026. Curated by Dr. Doron J. Lurie, the exhibition will open on Thursday, September 3, at 7 p.m., according to the gallery’s announcement.
The exhibition focuses on Arsenyuk’s recurring depictions of planets and celestial bodies. In her paintings, luminous spheres hover above scenes that initially appear familiar, while the boundary between ordinary experience and cosmic fantasy remains unstable. The gallery describes the works as part of a rich, fantastical pictorial world in which the everyday and the celestial exist side by side.
Arsenyuk’s visual language combines what the exhibition materials call fantastic realism, surrealism and an intensely colorful imagination. Her compositions are described as dense with detail, imagery and visual rhythms, producing the sensation of a “waking dream” in which the conscious and subconscious, the familiar and the mysterious, overlap. The paintings’ apparent division between earthly scenes below and planets in the upper portion of the image does not establish a firm separation between reality and fantasy.
The exhibition text notes that Arsenyuk sometimes places small rectangles containing landscapes inside painted interiors. These elements can read either as pictures on a wall or as windows onto an outside view, adding to the uncertainty between an interior world and the landscape beyond it. The gallery presents the artist as mediating between earthly and cosmic realms rather than treating them as separate domains.
For Arsenyuk, the planets carry meanings beyond astronomy. The exhibition materials state that they first appeared in her dreams as enormous, close and sometimes threatening forms. She later developed them as images of different worlds, human souls and the relationships between people. In a statement included with the exhibition text, Arsenyuk recalls dreams of planets that brought anxiety and fear, while also describing them as distant, glowing presences capable of suggesting calm and serenity.
Arsenyuk, 29, is identified by the gallery as a graduate of the Department of Multidisciplinary Art at Shenkar College. She lives and works alongside her twin sister, Elisheva, with whom she previously presented the joint exhibition 'Upon a Second Glance' at Zemack Contemporary Art. The sisters were born on the Crimean Peninsula, then part of Ukraine, and their family immigrated to Israel in 2002, when they were five. Arsenyuk has said that her mother, Galina, a painter trained in Ukraine, introduced her and her sister to drawing and painting during their childhood.
Zemack Contemporary Art lists its address at 68 Hey B-iyar Street in Tel Aviv. 'The Planets Go Wild' will remain on view at the gallery through October 16, 2026.
