Erna Rosenstein

One of the key figures of the Polish avant-garde, Rosenstein’s wartime survival, commitment to Surrealism, and lifelong adherence to leftist ideologies course through a remarkable array of paintings, drawings, and assemblage sculptures, as well as poems, diaristic writings, and deceptively whimsical children’s stories. Steeped in an extraordinary history and responding to the Nazi occupation of Poland, personal traumas suffered in the Holocaust, the postwar sociopolitical upheaval of her native country, and passionate engagement in the intellectual circles of her times, Erna Rosenstein’s work defies simple classification.

‘Once Upon a Time’ has been organized by curator Alison M. Gingeras. The exhibition brings together over forty works never seen outside of Poland, including institutional loans of landmark paintings and works from The Estate of Erna Rosenstein being exhibited publicly for the first time since the artist’s death in 2004. ‘Erna Rosenstein. Once Upon a Time’ is Hauser & Wirth’s first presentation of the artist’s work since undertaking representation of her estate in 2019, in collaboration with Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw.

Dating from the early 1950s to the end of the 1970s, abstracted landscapes and biomorphic reveries are hung on the wall in succession, demonstrating the intense focus of those two decades of her practice and reflecting the political and personal turmoil of those years. The work ‘Poświata (Afterglow)’ (1968), depicts a babbling brook running down from the valleys and rolling hills of a pastel landscape rendered in billowing pinks and citron greens, while in contrast, the painting ‘Kwiaty piekła (Hell Flowers)’ (1968) is saturated in deep reds and vibrating biological forms, evoking the sensation of nerve endings or internal organs.