Susan Hoffman Fishman Opening: A Retrospective of Holocaust Paintings, 1985-1995

Today, in 2014, sixty-nine years after the end of World War II, these paintings serve as both a powerful visual reminder of unspeakable evil and loss as well as a moving testimony to strength and survival.

Beginning in 1985 through 1995, Susan Hoffman Fishman completed dozens of large-scale paintings and drawings on the Holocaust that were exhibited and reviewed widely in New York, Boston and in other regional galleries.  As a young, emerging artist fresh out of graduate school at the time, Ms. Fishman developed an iconography of her own to address the horror of the Holocaust, including empty chairs that are positioned in drab waiting rooms, among sparse landscapes or atop precarious rock formations; tiny tanks that roam menacingly through innocent exterior or interior spaces; and train tracks leading endlessly into the distance. Her densely textured painting surfaces contain crumpled-up pieces of paper, fragmented images of concentration camp victims, snatches of Nazi documents, cloth, strips of wood veneer, cording, netting and many other embedded materials.

On March 7, 1993, in his Hartford Courant feature on the artist, entitled, “Visions of Violence in Waiting,” art critic Owen McNally described the Holocaust paintings as:

 “…a mix of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the real with the surreal. And they radiate an ominous awareness of history as a nightmare from which the world is trying to awake…Her chairs are signs of human existence. We don’t see people.  But the chairs, which have a semi-human form, imply their presence. More important, they are meant to draw the viewer into the waiting room to sit and reflect on Fishman’s themes of memory, history, fate, roads not taken and countless choices one faces every day…her work is socially oriented, dealing courageously with war, death and the evils we place on each other individually and corporately.”

Show runs through April 4.