An exhibition at Delta House Gallery in London was cancelled after the group UK Lawyers for Israel raised concerns over drawings described by the Telegraph newspaper as “dripping with Jew-hate.”
That appraisal ran in a review of a previous version of the show in Margate, where the artist Matthew Collings showed his work in an exhibition titled “Drawings Against Genocide.”
As reported by the Jerusalem Post, “The drawings in the collection are graphic. One depicts the owner of Sotheby’s, French-Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi, eating babies alive. Multiple depict Jews as devils with horns or standing on skulls with messages like ‘we love death.’”
The Margate iteration of the show was a source a controversy that led UK Lawyers for Israel to call for the cancelation of the exhibition in London, which had been scheduled for to run May 16–24 at a gallery space that is part of Delta House Studios. As the Jerusalem Post reported, Tom Berglund, chairman of Pineapple Corporation, which owns Delta House, said, “We were unaware of this intention for an exhibition as it was arranged without any consultation with the owners of the artist studios at Riverside Road.” He added, “We all hope the issues on the ground in the Middle East can eventually be resolved.”
In an Instagram post, Collings took issue with the characterization of the drawing said to reference Patrick Drahi and wrote: “The critical point of the satire of this particular drawing, is that the greatest most respected and admired beautiful art, is being used to whitewash Zionist atrocity. Zionism is not Jewishness.”
