KRAKOW, POLAND.- Krakow's national museum presents the first monographic presentation of Isaac Celnikier’s oeuvre in Poland through 30 March 2005. Its purpose is to acquaint the Polish viewers with the creation of Isaac Celnikier – a painter, drawer and graphic artist, who in 1957 settled in France.

The exhibition will feature approximately 120 paintings, 30 drawings and about 100 graphic works. It is meant as the artist’s retrospective, covering his creative output from 1945 to 2004. On the one hand, the exhibition will recall the works by Celnikier, one of the leading participants in the All-Polish Exhibition of Young Plastic Artists in the Varsovian Arsenal in 1955, from the period when he lived and worked in Poland (that is before 1957), on the other, it will present to the public Celnikier’s paintings and graphic works created in France and Israel over the years 1957-2004.

The most important part of the exhibition, titled The Time of Tears…, the Time of Hatred…, the Time of War…, consists of paintings, drawings and graphic works that constitute an artistic document of the martyrdom and extermination of the Jews in Poland during World War II. The subject refers to the artist’s private experiences. First, as a seventeen-year-old boy, he survived the hell of the Białystok ghetto and its liquidation. Then, as a young twenty-year-old man, he underwent the horror of the extermination camps at Sztutowo, Birkenau and Buna, and after the evacuation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, lived through tragic deportations and “death transports” to Mathausen, Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, and Dachau.

Celnikier’s canvases: Hostages, Revolt, Ashes, Day of Rebellion, Jewish Fiancées, and Birkenau are very powerful in rendering the dramatic atmosphere of the presented scenes. They revoke the cruelty of the situation in which the Jews found themselves, condemned to persecutions and death. In the graphic compositions devoted to the Shoah, the artist – using a sharp nervous line and highly expressive colour patches – depicts resettlements, requisitions and mass murders perpetrated on the helpless Jewish population; he tells us about the martyrdom of the persecuted nation, revoking the faces of people permanently threatened by death. Celnikier is one of those who through their participation in the cataclysm that by far surpassed all previous human experiences, took upon himself the duty of passing on the story of the victims suffering in ghettoes and extermination camps.

This part of the exhibition refers to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which occurred on 27 January 1945. On this occasion, the celebrations will take place in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, bringing together the representatives of the highest authorities of Poland, Israel and other countries, including France.

In Celnikier’s rich artistic creation, besides compositions devoted to the tragic fate of the Jews during World War II, a special place is occupied by female portraits and nudes. And so it is portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes that fill the second part of the exhibition, entitled The Time of Building…, the Time of Love, the Time of Peace…

Within this space around 80 oil paintings and 80 prints and drawings will be put on show. The dominant set will, obviously, consist of portraits of women – especially of one, named Anne, the artist’s wife. In this unusual gallery of images we can see the faces full of inner tension, solemn, intent, the faces of persons fully aware of life. The exhibition is complemented with the landscapes from the surroundings of Jerusalem and Sainte-Agnès in southern France. These are the views of the places to which the artist would constantly return.
A rich painterly texture and formal solutions applied in the displayed works inscribe them in the current of broadly understood expressionist art.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with 100 reproductions, a chronology of the artist’s life and oeuvre, and the list of the presented paintings, drawings and prints. Curators of the exhibition: Danuta Godyń, Krystyna Kulig-Janarek. Co-organizer of the exhibition: The French Institute in Cracow. The exhibition has been organized with the financial help of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.