Erna Rosenstein

Erna Rosenstein’s six-decade career was fueled by the formation of prewar artistic, intellectual and political affiliations, and is expressed in a constant oscillation between autobiographical figuration and biomorphic abstraction. While Rosenstein produced artworks in the prewar period, nothing survived the war; instead, she filtered the memories of her early life through fantastical stories and enchanting visual landscapes. Grappling with themes of memory, trauma, longing and loss, she used paint, ink and found materials to suggest a world tinged with allegory, enchantment and fairytale. ‘Erna Rosenstein’ brings together fifty works, including works from the Estate of Erna Rosenstein, that will be exhibited publicly for the first time since the artist’s death in 2004, generously loaned by her son Adam Sandauer.

This work is particularly charged with personal meaning: it was made in 1968, a turbulent year for Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust as many were forced to emigrate from Poland by the Communist government in an antisemitic purge. Rosenstein opted to stay in Poland, a painful scenario reflected in the sometimes-violent imagery that surfaced in her work of this period. These works are exemplary of the artist’s abstract practice in which biomorphic shapes undulate and pulse on the surface of the canvas. The forms often evoke bodily sensations of inner landscapes that belong to the mystical realm of the psyche. Often discussed in regard to their alchemical qualities, Rosenstein’s abstract landscapes are rooted in the unconscious mind and arouse otherworldly and cosmological allusions.

The traumatic loss of her parents is also the subject of ‘Bardzo Dawne (From Long Ago)’ (undated). This physically small yet monumentally important painting not only depicts the traumatic murder of Rosenstein’s parents, but it also suggests the fairy tale as the central form and conceptual core of her entire practice. This shift towards a more figurative style is shown in a selection of expressive drawings that span from the early 1970s to the 1990s. On view are a group of eight works on paper in their original authorial framing suspended from the ceiling, depicting dream-like imagery that has become a hallmark of her oeuvre.

Rosenstein’s ‘Szafa (Cabinet)’ (ca. 1960 – 2004), an everyday cabinet, functioned as a piece of furniture in the artist’s home studio, housing her writings, sketchbooks and correspondence. A ‘cabinet of curiosities’ of sorts, it operated dually as a repository for her creative impulses: Rosenstein adorned the cabinet’s doors with personal references and trinkets, collecting collaged found objects, postcards, photographs and reproductions of Flemish paintings. Rosenstein’s writings coexisted alongside her visual artistic practice from as early as the 1940s when she began to publish children’s tales in Polish magazines. After the birth of her son in 1950, she commenced writing fairytales that, like her paintings, drew their narratives from the tension between magical realism and a bleak, pragmatic reality replete with loneliness and misfortune. Often, her writings become allegories of her own Polish Jewish experience with antisemitism.

The gallery is open Tue – Fri, 11 am – 6 pm and Sat, 11 am – 5 pm. Please visit our location page to plan your visit.