Arnold Mesches “The War Images”

M. David & Co

poster for Arnold Mesches “The War Images”

This event has ended.

M. David & Co. presents Arnold Mesches: The War Images.

For the first time the paintings from the War Series will be exhibited together. The War Images portray the undocumented moments during World War II after the Nazi guards had fled the concentration camps in advance of the Allied forces and before the American and Russian soldiers liberated the survivors.

When the artist was asked about how he and the rest of America first learned about the camps he responded: “Even before the war started there were rumors. People escaped Germany and tried to warn the world that the ghettos were being emptied, that thousands were being rounded up and shipped to forced labor camps. Every time you went to a movie, the newsreels showed Jews being beaten, Jewish stores smashed and burned, Jewish doctors forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes. After the war, Life magazine published the first photos of the liberated camps taken by service men. Even though we feared what the Nazis were doing, those photographs stunned me. To imagine cruelty of this magnitude and then to see it in black and white. Those images are scored on my memory.”

The War Images read as both image and abstraction, documentation and hallucination. Gestural lines slowly transmogrifies before the viewer’s eye into heaped corpses being feasted upon by a vulture-like bird or survivors dancing in anguished jubilation. Every line serves two purposes - to delineate the suffering and to capture something unseen. These drawings and paintings continue the tradition of artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Goya (two of Mesches’s gods) bearing witness to genocide.

Media

Schedule

from February 15, 2020 to March 01, 2020

Opening Reception on 2020-02-14 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Arnold Mesches

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use