Description

On the surreal figuration of an influential postwar artist, covering four decades of paintings, sculptures, drawings and film

Published with Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.

Working in the wake of postwar trauma and traversing the European and American avant-gardes, the prolific Polish-born painter Maryan (né Pinchas Burstein, 1927-77) created a thrilling post-expressionist vocabulary that has never seemed so prescient.
My Name Is Maryan explores the totality of Maryan's career, including how his work was impacted by his firsthand experiences of the Holocaust; his dialogue with peers, from CoBrA artists such as Constant, Asger Jorn and Pierre Alechinsky to his American circle of artists, particularly H.C. Westermann, June Leaf and Leon Golub; his black-and-white works of the 1950s; and a recreation of his studio at the Chelsea Hotel, where he made his final works in the 1970s.
Maryan's historically important single-figure Personnage paintings--highly influential on artists such as Caroll Dunham and Eddie Martinez, and first shown in Paris in 1960--are included, recreating the bulk of that exhibition for the first time.