oil / canvas
41,5 x 34 cm
66 x 58 cm (with frame)
signed and dated p.d.: 1979 Rosenstein
signed on the reverse: opens
Erna Rosenstein was born in 1913 in Lviv, Poland. She was a painter, creator of collages, objects and art books, and a poet of Jewish descent. From 1932 to 1934 she studied at the Frauen Akademie in Vienna. Even then, she sympathized with communist circles by collaborating with the Vienna Workers' Union. In 1934-1937 she studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, where she came into contact with Jadwiga Maziarska and Jonasz Stern, who represented similar leftist views (at that time Rosenstein co-founded a cell of the communist organization at the Academy of Fine Arts), as well as artistic interests. From 1936, she was informally associated with the 1st Cracow Group and worked with the Cricot Theater. She spent the turn of 1937-1938 in Paris, where she was strongly influenced by an exhibition of the Surrealists and, seen on her way back through Germany, the mock exhibition Entartete Kunst, which portrayed modern art as degeneration and a threat, but nevertheless presented the work of the greatest modernists of the time. Rosenstein made her debut a few months before the outbreak of war at the House of Artists in Krakow. After the events of September 1939, she left with her parents for Lviv, and as the Germans entered the city, the family was moved to the local ghetto. There Erna Rosenstein witnessed the murder of her parents, which later marked her work. She repeatedly returned to that event in an attempt to depict the body exposed to danger. In her art, the body is split. At the same time it functions as a source of life, an object of nature, but it is also sometimes dismembered and deformed like waste, an object, a place of pain and destruction. Rosenstein escaped from the ghetto in 1942 until the end of the occupation, hiding on the Aryan side under many names. After liberation, she moved to Warsaw where she became a member of the ZZPAP and joined the PPR. Despite the change of residence, she remained strongly connected to the Cracow community. In 1946, she took part in the exhibition of Young Artists, tying herself to the so-called "modern group" and later co-founding the Second Krakow Group. In the late 1940s, she traveled to Switzerland and Paris seeing exhibitions of the Surrealists. In 1948, she took part in the First Exhibition of Modern Art at the Palace of Art in Krakow.
Despite her clear leftist views, she did not recognize the Socialist Realist doctrine in art, calling it "schematism." She did not exhibit her works until 1955. After the Thaw, she took part in the famous Exhibition of Nine - one of the first presentations of modern art after the period of imposed socialist realism. She was accompanied by Tadeusz Brzozowski, Jonasz Stern, Jadwiga Maziarska, Maria Jarema, Tadeusz Kantor, Kazimierz Mikulski, Jerzy Nowosielski and Jerzy Skarżyński. Subsequently, she participated in the Second (1957) and Third (1959) Exhibition of Modern Art in Warsaw. In Warsaw, she was associated with the Krzywe Koło Gallery, where she had a solo exhibition in 1958. She became famous for her large exhibition at the Zachęta Gallery arranged by Tadeusz Kantor (1967).
Erna Rosenstein's art seems to be provoked by impulse. The artist was fond of strange, surprising combinations remaining close to the poetics of surrealism. In her art she used recognizable forms as well as completely abstract ones freely combining reality and fantasy. With finesse she mixed the sensual and the spiritual, the graspable and the ephemeral, the mature and the immature. The meaning of Rosenstein's works is the artist's desire to get as close as possible in art to the personal: memories, experiences, fantasies and dreams. Her works bear the mark of a poetic, dreamlike mood - the result of transferring the inner world into the realm of art.
In the 1950s and. 60s, Rosenstein's art was dominated by organic forms constantly transforming into new creations and paying homage to the irrepressible vitality of nature. Later compositions are more disciplined, dominated by line and mysterious architectural structures. The presented oil, with the mysterious title Opening , fits into this aesthetic . The composition, built of blue lines, depicts an indefinite architectural form, which by its shape resembles a monumental curtain or a kind of theatrical scenery. The red color dominant, contrasting with the cold blue and neutral background, seems to peek out from behind the curtain opening the way to another, hidden world. The unquestionable strength of Rosenstein's art is its ambiguity, which takes the viewer into a lyrical world of associations, interpretations and references bringing them face to face with the artist's attempt to preserve the traces of life's ephemerality.
In 1977, the artist was awarded the Cyprian Karol Norwid Art Criticism Prize, and in 1996 she received the Jan Cybis Prize awarded for lifetime achievement.
