Curator : Sorin Heller

This exhibition focuses on Alexander Bogen's work in Israel, which, fifty years later, is still ichnographically connected to the work produced during the time of the Holocaust. Bogen's drawings, especially those that survived the fighting of the partisans in the forests, are a firsthand testimony to these events. He creates a gallery of characters, of types, of situations, of a people fighting for its life, that constitute the basis of the myth of the revolt and the renascence.

The exhibition presents drawings for poems by two Yiddish poets: Gebirtig and Sutzkever. Bogen's drawings that accompany the poems of Gebirtig have been published before (1997), but the drawings for Sutzkever's poems were done just now or, more accurately, have just been collected and linked to the poems for this exhibition. The two groups of poems are representative of Bogen's work (some of which was created in the past five years), but in terms of theme, the drawings are connected with the period of the Holocaust and the Revolt, and thus constitute a kind of closing of a circle in his oeuvre. The exhibition thus presents the more graphic aspect of Bogen's art – work that accompanies literary texts in Yiddish, poems and prose –, which constitutes one of the two main axes of his oeuvre.

To Exhibition Catalogue Alexander Bogen (2002)