Maryan: Works from the 60s
Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York
September 5 — October 12, 2002
Adam Baumgold Gallery presents the exhibition "Maryan:Works from the 60's". The artist's first New York solo show in twelve years will focus on paintings, works on paper and linoleum cuts that Maryan (1927-1977) executed after he moved to New York in 1962.
Born Pinchas Burstein in 1927 in Poland, Maryan and his family were arrested in 1939 and placed in various labor and concentration camps. When the Russians liberated the camps in 1945, Maryan had lost a leg but survived. None of his family lived. Maryan was 18. After the war, Maryan studied art in Jerusalem and moved to Paris in 1950 where he studied art again at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and established his reputation in Europe before moving to New York.
The "Personnages" work from the 1960's show solitary figures in often brutal, boisterous, aggressive, and theatrical poses that are always executed with heightened colors, deft draftsmanship and a formal elegance. The paintings and drawings depict figures caught in the comedy of the human condition somewhere between Beckett's "Endgame," Commedia del Arte characters, Kafka and Goya.
The exhibition features a large painting "Personnage," 1962, that shows the twisted upper torso of a man in military uniform - fingers bloody, tongue skewered defiantly to the side of his mouth with two solitary red chess pieces on either side of his body. A series of eight linoleum cuts from 1962 has costumed, seated figures with part comical, part maniacal facial expressions and wildly gesticulating hand movements. These works are done with a bold and crisp line that is the organizing force in all the drawings and works on paper in the exhibition.
Maryan's work was linked at times to movements such as CoBrA, Nouvelle Figuration, and other artists, among them Peter Saul, Philip Guston, and H.C. Westermann, as well as the Chicago Imagists, Jim Nutt and Ed Paschke, but the very personal nature of his oeuvre makes it unique and original. That Maryan was an artist provided him with the means to address his life experiences on his own terms - his "Truth Paintings," as he called them, are "autobiographical" - "I will be myself in any color I put on the canvas."
Maryan was included in such ground breaking exhibitions as "Human Condition/Personal Torment," at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969, as well as "Ten Independents," in 1972, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Maryan's work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY, Musee National d'Art Moderne Centre George Pompidou, Paris, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., among others.
*The essay "The Work of Maryan: An Injunction to See," written by Jeanne Marie Wasilik in the book "Maryan Behold a Man and His Work" was an important source for this press release.
ADAM BAUMGOLD GALLERY
74 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10021
www.adambaumgoldgallery.com
