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Erna Rosenstein
On the Other Side of Silence
For the first time in Austria, a major retrospective will pay tribute to Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004), a key figure of the postwar avant-garde in Poland. Against the backdrop of the Shoah and historic upheavals in Poland, her works bear witness to the resilience of an artist, who never wavered in her political convictions and artistic ideals. In a career spanning six decades, Rosenstein developed a multimedia visual cosmos that reveals how the present interweaves with memories of the past, and how collective and individual experiences are intertwined.
Curated by Stephanie Auer.
Assistant Curator: Miroslav Haľák
In cooperation with
Digital Photography: Studio at the National Museum Poznań
Digital Photography: Studio at the National Museum Poznań
The Exhibition
In the early 1930s, Erna Rosenstein spent two years in Vienna where she studied at the Women’s Academy. None of her works from this phase have survived: they were lost or destroyed due to persecution, flight, and the need to conceal her identity as a Jewish artist in Nazi-occupied Poland.
After World War II, Rosenstein developed an expressive pictorial language to visualize the unspeakable experiences of collective and personal trauma. As a way of remembering and processing the past, over many decades she repeatedly engaged with the brutal murder of her parents in her work. This lifelong introspection and retrospection are key themes in the exhibition. The many portraits of her mother and father convey how the artist consistently adhered to figuration, despite a biomorphic abstraction increasingly characterizing her work from the 1950s.
Rosenstein’s abstract compositions resemble inner landscapes revealing echoes of Surrealism and dreamlike states. Her enigmatic, poetic titles unfurl surprising interpretative spaces and show how word and image are closely connected for the painter and poet. They reflect the experience of time and space, loss, grief, and historical events. At the same time, the assemblages brought together in the exhibition demonstrate Rosenstein’s aim to transport seemingly worthless everyday objects into new narrative contexts through unexpected combinations.
Over more than six decades, Rosenstein created a multimedia pictorial cosmos as a powerful act of remembrance and resistance against forgetting. Based on her paintings, assemblages, and drawings, the latter shown for the first time outside of Poland, the exhibition invites critical engagement with the processing and preservation of personal and collective histories.
Biography
Erna Rosenstein, born in 1913 in Lviv in what is now Ukraine, joined the illegal organization International Red Aid (MOPR) while still attending school in Kraków. She studied at the Women’s Academy in Vienna from 1932 to 1934, her parents hoping this would steer her away from political activism. However, Rosenstein remained politically active in Austria and after her return to Poland, where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. During World War II and the occupation of Poland, the Jewish Rosenstein family faced persecution by the Nazis. Erna Rosenstein’s parents were murdered in front of the artist while the family was trying to escape. Although wounded, she survived and spent the rest of the war in hiding, living under false identities. After the war, she traveled to Switzerland, Britain, and France in 1947/48. While in Paris, Rosenstein visited Surrealist exhibitions, and she also met her future husband, literary critic and translator Artur Sandauer. The couple settled in Warsaw in 1949. In the early 1950s, Rosenstein distanced herself from the official art world, opposing the doctrine of Socialist Realism and persisting with her Surrealist visual language. In postwar communist Poland, Rosenstein again faced waves of repression, culminating in the anti-Semitic campaign waged by the state in 1968. Yet the artist never left the communist party or went into exile, instead becoming one of the most important exponents of postwar art in Poland. A founding member of the second Kraków Group, which also included artists Tadeusz Kantor, Maria Jarema, and Tadeusz Brzozowski, Rosenstein contributed to major exhibitions of contemporary art both in Poland and abroad.
