Entitled “I Open My Eyes, There’s No One,” the exhibition is dedicated to Jewish artists working in a copy-making studio run in the Białystok ghetto during World War II by Nazi officer Oskar Steffen.
He equipped the studio with the necessary facilities for effective work and supplied high-quality paints and painting materials.
The artists made wholesale copies of paintings by great masters of European painting, which were transported to Germany.
The talent of Jewish artists did not protect them from extermination. From a group of about 20 of them, only one, Izaak Celnikier, survived the war, and it is on his memoirs and graphics that the exhibition’s narrative is based.
After the war, Celnikier studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw. From 1957 until his death in 2011, he lived in France. Most of his works focused on the Holocaust, biblical motifs and Israeli landscapes.
The exhibition is a joint project by the University of Aberdeen and the Polish Association Aberdeen, a Polish diaspora organization.
It is curated by Marta Surowiec, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, southwestern Poland, who currently lives in Scotland where she is involved in activities for the Polish community and the promotion of Polish history, culture and national heritage.
The exhibition runs until the end of February.
(mk/gs)