Holocaust Bone Structures Gallery
Minneapolis-Artist Roy Strassberg honors his Jewish heritage, as well as the awesome endurance of a people who suffered unspeakable atrocities, with an astonishing wall-to-wall installation of ceramic bone-like structures. Strassberg's exhibition entitled "Holocaust Bone Structures" is presented by the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) March 6 to April 19 in the museum's Minnesota Gallery. A free public reception will be held Thursday, March 5, from 7 to 9 p.m. and Strassberg will give a free public slide lecture about the evolution of his work on Thursday, April 2 at 7 p.m. in the museum's Pillsbury Auditorium.
Strassberg's bone-like structures are simultaneously chilling, horrifying, and hauntingly beautiful. The ceramic sculpture featured in the exhibition evokes images of boxcars, houses, skeletal fragments, animal forms, dancing figures, crosses, swastikas, and stars. His vast "seas of bones" alludes to the countless people who lost their lives in the Holocaust. The elemental purity of his sculpture urges viewers to pay attention and never forget, but it also reminds us that the human spirit can never be destroyed.
"No matter how one approaches this event from an aesthetic point of view, the result is never depiction, and perhaps can be very problematic representation," said Stephen Feinstein, acting director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota and author of the exhibition's essay. "Nevertheless. artists have continued to delve into this murky area because of both the historical and aesthetic challenges, and because of the need to remember it.
"Strassberg does not leave the viewer with a convenient way to escape a narrow interpretation of his work, These ceramic pieces are not 'untitled' or architectonic constructions.' But they are what they are- reminders of monumental savagery: Trains to Auschwitz, Ritual Slaughter, Traveling Like Cattle, and Shmutzik Juden, to name a few," Feinstein added.
The exhibition represents the culmination of five years of work for Strassberg and is a radical departure from what he has created in the past Since the 1970s, his elaborately glazed, colorful ceramic sculpture-which emphasizes a planar, architectural construction-has received critical acclaim. Intermittently, however, Strassberg has explored images related to ethnicity. His series of stark white "guard tower" and chilling "row call" pieces of the early I 980s, for example, predicted the simpler and more accessible process and original aesthetic that evolved by the early 1990s.
Contact Roy Strassberg: rstrassb@uncc.edu
Contact: Faith McGown, Public Relations (612) 870-3088
News Release, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 13, 1998
THE MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ARTS News Release was modified for the web at the artist's request: 21 January 1998
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Last modified: 24 January 1998 Digital Media by: Mark R. Thomas