It is on display in the rooms of Block 21 at the former Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz.
The exhibition features nearly 50 artworks executed almost exclusively in Prussian Blue, one of the earliest artificially developed pigments, which is chemically related to the prussic acid found in Zyklon B, the lethal agent used in some Nazi German concentration and extermination camps.
By an unforeseen turn, conspicuous traces of the blue pigment have remained in some of the extant gas chambers.
Born in 1963, Jusidman is a Mexican artist of Jewish heritage currently based in Los Angeles.
In the Prussian Blue series, he tackles a difficult question: can contemporary art contribute to the collective memory of past atrocities, and if so, in what way?
In his remarks at the opening ceremony, Judisman said: “The series was produced between 2010 and 2017 with the idea of being shown in contemporary art museums. For me, I always wanted to bring this exhibition to Europe. And it proved to be an incredible, difficult challenge because of the subject, I think … For me, the event is really one of the most significant, important moments of my life.”
In the introductory text to the exhibition, the artist wrote: “In the early 1950s, the esteemed cultural critic Theodor Adorno argued that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ His admonition endured. By extension, painters, too, were implicitly discouraged from dabbling with the Holocaust. The gap between the event and the possibility of its representation, we were told, was unbridgeable. Yet with the passing of time and generations, the imperative to suitably address the Holocaust through art has only grown more urgent.”
The most important part of the series consists of unique naturalistic reproductions of photographs of gas chambers in several German Nazi camps, such as Auschwitz, Majdanek, Stutthof, and Mauthausen, as well as the spaces of extermination centres, including Treblinka and Sobibór.
Paweł Sawicki from the Auschwitz Museum Press Bureau has said that the Prussian Blue exhibition is the first large-scale contemporary art exhibition at the site of the former camp. It is also the first time Judisman’s art is shown in Europe.
The exhibition runs until October 2026.
(mk)
Source: Auschwitz Museum, PAP