Category: war

Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Adel Abdessemed

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Adel Abdessemed (-1971) is an Algerian-French contemporary artist.He fled Algeria after the beginning of the 1992 civil war, taking with him the memory of the war and the range of atrocities.The artist has been educated at the International City of Arts, Paris, National School of Fine Arts of Lyon, France, the higher School of Fine Arts of Algiers, and Regional School of Fine Arts of Batna, Algeria.Abdessemed embraces a wide variety of media, including drawing, sculpture, performance, video and installation. His work often deals with the themes of war, violence and religion and is characterized by brutal imagery that attempts to depict the inherent violence of the contemporary world.

He is known for his strong works, breaking and transforming the flow of images and the tension of today’s world.Abdessemed manipulates familiar materials and images to create provocative and often violent works influenced by his exposure to the Gulf War and its global impact.

More of Adel Abdessemed’s heartfelt artworks can be found at https://www.adelabdessemed.com/.

 

 

 

Faerie Paths — Madness

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The horrors of these days make the world seem insane, issues and motives and reasoning lost in the zeal of the moment. And we, as living, breathing individuals can do nothing to stop the madness. We are beyond prayers.
Zdzisław Beksiński

 

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack, saying ‘You are mad; you are not like us.”

~St. Anthony the Great

 

 

Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Zinovii Tolkatchev

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Zinovii Shenderovich Tolkatchev (1903-1977) was born in the town of Shchedrin in Belarus.

In 1928, Tolkatchev studied art in Kiev and in 1929 held an exhibition on the death of Lenin.  In the thirties, he illustrated books, including works by Gorky and Sholem Aleichem, and exhibited the series, “The Shtetl”.

From 1941-1945, he served as an official artist in the Red Army. In the summer of 1944 he was attached to the Soviet forces at the front after the liberation of Majdanek, and afterwards to the forces liberating Auschwitz.

Horrified by what he witnessed, Tolkatchev spent over a month painting scenes from within the newly liberated death camp.These drawings were supposed to depict the moment of liberation from the point of view of the liberator: the excitement and happiness of the prisoners receiving the Red Army soldiers as saviors.

Shocked by the actual sights he witnessed, he often depicted Jesus as an actual camp inmate, wearing a striped uniform marked by every possible defamation sign – the Jewish yellow star, the red triangle of political prisoners, and the individual prison number, the numerical tattoo on his lower arm can also be seen.
His Majdanek paintings became one of the earliest artistic series to publicly document the Nazi death camps.Tolkatchev accompanied the Nazi Crimes Investigation Commission to Auschwitz, arriving within hours of the camp’s liberation by the Soviet Army on January 27, 1945.Using only materials immediately available, Tolkatchev made many of his drawings in pencil and on Nazi stationary taken from the commandant’s office.Looking back on his work, Tolkatchev wrote, “I did what I had to do; I couldn’t refrain from doing it. My heart commanded, my conscience demanded.”

More of Zinovii Tolkatchev‘s inspirational work can be found at  https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/art-liberation/tolkatchev.asp.