Special exhibition showcases Judaism’s great sages as rockstars
The daughter of the man behind Searching for Sugar Man has one portraits of 12 religious icons
Natalia Rabinowitz grew up in Cape Town surrounded by music icons. Her father is Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, the record-store owner whose hunt for a vanished American musician became the Oscar-winning 2013 documentary Searching for Sugar Man. That reverence for music’s heroes became hers, and she has now turned it somewhere unexpected.
Rockstar Rabbis is her debut solo exhibition: fourteen hand-drawn portraits that reimagine Judaism’s great sages, among them the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and the Baba Sali, as the cultural icons she believes they always were, set against the kaleidoscopic look of the concert posters she was raised among.
The fourteen works were shown together for the first time last week at Chabad of Hampstead Garden Suburb.
The series began as a private 40th-birthday gift for Natalia’s husband – a portrait of the Rebbe. She then drew one rabbi a week, studying each through that week’s Torah portion until she could capture, in her words, “not just a likeness but an essence”.
At a moment when Jewish life in Britain feels under pressure, Natalia framed her exhibition as “celebration rather than defence”.
She says: “This body of work is a coming together of the two chapters of my life. My musical unconventional upbringing and my spiritually rich adult life. I hope to take it to different cities around the world, each time adding new “members to the band”.
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