Painting Auschwitz Blue
Painting Auschwitz Blue
ARTnews previews the exhibition Prussian Blue - Memory After Representation: Yishai Jusidman opening at the Americas Society on January 23.
Some artists trick the public into perceiving images of the Holocaust anew; others want viewers to "feel" it.
Notes on Camps
In a show called “Prussian Blue” opening later this month at the Americas Society, Yishai Judisman, a Mexico-born artist living in Los Angeles, will exhibit paintings depicting gas chambers from various concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Dachau, and Birkenau.
His pigments are chemically or conceptually derived from the compounds used to gas the Jews, from Prussian Blue (related to the cyanide-iron compound in stains created by Zyklon B in the gas chambers) to flesh tones (a reference to the victims who were murdered in the spaces he depicts).
The soft-spoken monotones, derived from photographs, are intended “to generate the pictorial impression of a silence as solemn and forthright as it is eloquent,” the artist explains in his statement. He’s trying to “trigger what the sheer awareness of the Holocaust feels like....”
