Survivor’s experience has fashioned sculpting talent
Curwen and New Academy Art Gallery, London W1
TH I S E X H I B I T I O N marks the sculptor’s 90th birthday, as well as the publication of two new books about her. Born in Czechoslovakia, she and her family were transported to Auschwitz, where many of them were sent to the gas chambers. Having escaped a Nazi death march, she made her way to Palestine, where she joined the Palmach.
Injured by shrapnel from a British bullet, she was recuperating in hospital when a friend brought her a knife and some olive wood and encouraged her to carve shapes out of the wood. But she took up sculpture seriously only after marriage and a move to London.
In particular, she depicts family groups protected by softly curved womb-like ovals. The smooth contours often have a very tactile quality that make you want to stroke the sculpture. In the 1980s, her Man Against the Odds series showed a small figure clinging to a sail. These have movement and energy and Blake suggests they represent her starting to break away from her past. These were followed by a more abstract series inspired by the wings of birds.
Unsurprisingly, a number of her works are Holocaust memorials, one of which is displayed at Finchley’s Sternberg Centre and will be rededicated on Yom Hashoah.
The exhibition includes a number of maquettes for these works, including one that has not yet been made fullscale in which the Hebrew word for six is designed to hold six memorial candles for the six million who perished. This is appropriately mounted on a base resembling train tracks.
But there is also a flavour of the variety of her work over the past 58 years, during which she has received many commissions from churches and synagogues, reflecting her commitment to interfaith harmony.
Having been through the horrors of the death camps, she has said that her studio is her form of heaven. “Some people have it after they die. I have it now.”
A NUMBER OF HER WORKS ARE HOLOCAUST MEMORIALS
The exhibition runs until April 26