Shredded fragments of drawings commit husband to image and memory

As part of this year’s voluminous Edinburgh Art Festival there is a plethora of shows at Summerhall, the city’s energetic experimental arts venue, where the stand-out act is a series of arresting and traumatic drawings by Diana Zwibach, a Serbian artist with Jewish heritage who is based in Lancashire. Growing up in Novi Sad and Tel Aviv, Zwibach and her family were no strangers to trauma.

More recently, following the death of her husband, Anthony Febland, Zwibach has had to contend with a new reality and a deeply personal loss. Zwibach felt that her world — and her work as an artist — had lost meaning. She began a process of destruction, surely the antithesis of the creative impulse, by tearing apart her drawings and paintings.

As if by some miracle, however, Zwibach began to reassemble these shredded fragments by pasting and stitching them together in different combinations, often adding new elements to the reconfigured drawings.

Central to her work is a narrative of human characters, interacting often in extremis: figures from history, from mythology and from her own family. Here, now, is Febland, at once a real character but also an archetypal “lost love”. He appears as in dream and memory fragments, manifesting across these 50 or so spiky, deeply felt personal and universal stories. If anyone has inherited Marc Chagall’s mantle, it is Zwibach.

These are profoundly female images, where a central character is the artist herself, or at least a version of her. Most of these works are untitled; in one (numbered 42) the collaged fragments (a leg, a torso, a face) are reconfigured so that a female form is encased by a male. His face is missing but his tie remains. A forlorn dog sits near one of the oversized feet.

Febland will not call back but he will reappear as a vital presence in image and memory in the years to follow. New energy emerges from loss and despair; the powerful meanings here enrich and expand the work.

Until September 25.