Holocaust survivor teams up with Polish artist for new exhibit

• Published date: 24 April 2024
• Author: BARRY DAVIS
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Remarkably, the two joined forces last year to collaborate in the "Life After All" exhibition at the Museum of Masovian Jews in Plock, housed in a former synagogue, some 110 km. west of Warsaw. Now the show is getting a reprise here and is due to run at the President Hotel Gallery in Jerusalem, May 2-June 13, under the auspices of the Polish foundation, Fundacja Wojciecha Ciesniewskiego. The Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Tel Aviv, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw Ghetto Museum, and the Polish Institute Tel Aviv also support the project

It is an unlikely synergy on all sorts of counts. For starters there is the plain fact that Blum spent her early formative years in the most trying of circumstances, somehow surviving by her wits and those of her elders, and the intervention of plain old Lady Luck. She and Ciesniewski, of course, belong to different generations and live in very different societies. They also employ contrasting stylistic vehicles of expression spawned by their disparate takes on translating their individual emotional baggage and philosophical outlook into visual form.

Understanding the Life After All exhibit

The title of the exhibition imparts something of an oxymoronic, if not contradictory, element. Blum, who lived in Jerusalem for 60 years before moving to Tel Aviv last year to be near her family, has said in various interviews over the years, that she paints in order to forget her traumatic childhood and youth in Poland. Meanwhile, Ciesniewski states unequivocally that he paints to try to keep alive the memory of those who perished and to honor those who survived, such as Blum.

There is a similar yin-yang feel to the artists' painting styles. Blum leans towards the abstract, notwithstanding the fact that the main theme of her January 2023 exhibition, at the Biennale Gallery in Jerusalem's old Shaarei Zedek Hospital building, was the landscapes she viewed from her former residence in the capital. Ciesniewski's style is far more visceral and tends towards the figurative.

Interestingly, the Polish painter, who teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, has plenty of abstract output in the initial part of his oeuvre. He spent his youth and early adulthood under the constraints of communist rule, and he eventually gravitated towards the figurative with a view to making his paintings less ambiguous and more communicative. More recently, he has been turning to motifs taken from dramatic junctures of the 20th...