From the Artist
As an artist engaged with painfully difficult topics, my journey began in childhood with the daily reality of The Holocaust in my immigrant community. Art gave me a positive way to give form and expression to the rage, grief and horror within and around me. This portfolio of ten prints, created at Brandywine, constitute but a small part of my thirteen years of work on The Holocaust.
Working at Brandywine, especially with Allan Edmunds, was a very special and enriching time for me and I eventually opened out to explore catastrophes like 9/11, the continuing legacy of racism, the destruction of the environment and of irreplaceable buildings like Notre Dame de Paris and the suffering of animals.
At Brandywine I experienced absolute freedom to experiment with both rapid-fire gestural drawings, and with a new material that enabled it. Mylar, used instead of traditional litho stones or plates, permitted the subtle gray scale washes and pitch-black blacks perfectly suited to the intensity I sought in my images. I decided to combine archival photographs with elements from my own imagination to enhance possible interpretations.
I hope these images will provoke viewers to learn about The Holocaust and to recognize the similarities to neo-Nazi groups: antisemitic, racist, in love with guns, violence and a totalitarian ideal. If they succeed the result will look like these images.
—From Brandywine Workshop and Archive records
New York-based artist Murray Zimiles earned a BFA in painting and printmaking from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MFA in painting and printmaking from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Zimiles was the subject of a m...