Sabbath in Prague
Painter Scarlet Nikolska was born into a Jewish family in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) on 2 June 1949, and she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 1969–74. She settled in England in the year of her graduation and had a solo show at Ben Uri in 1975 which reflected the characters and architecture of the old Prague Ghetto. Her subject matter was inspired by Jewish ritual and tradition, and the vanished ghetto life of Eastern Europe – particularly memories of scenes encountered in Prague, Cracow and Budapest – while her strong colourist aesthetic showed affinities with 20th-century Jewish masters, such as Mané-Katz-and Josef Herman The Daily Telegraph observed that it reflected 'the history and the spiritual tradition of her Jewish faith through the figures and forms she lived among in the Jewish ghetto [...] a remarkable record of a way of life and thought which is now dying out'. She later travelled widely including in the USA and Israel and relocated to Paris in the early 2000s with her second husband. Her work has been exhibited in London, Paris, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro, Vienna, Prague, Bologna, Chicago, New York and Japan.
