In her current body of work, Ewa Harabasz lifts images from the front pages of newspapers from around the world to use in her paintings. Drawing from the tradition of icon painting, her works become contemporary icons in which troubled men, women, and children are subject to the random catastrophe of man-made violence or natural disaster.

In her painting of a soldier holding a child, referring to the Beslan hostage crisis of 2004, a riflescope trained on the man’s face doubles as a halo and overlaps another nimbus around the head of the child. Although the viewer is implicated as an enemy, we also become his mirror.

While icons and saints are determined by the spiritual needs of the Church, Harabasz transforms her works into lush and beautiful icons determined by the spiritual needs of a secular world at political and moral risk. We are psychologically included, ethically implicated, and philosophically confronted by a modern day construction of “the holy.”