ACFNY RECOMMENDED | DRAWING AGAINST OBLIVION – MANFRED BOCKELMANN
Drawing Against Oblivion by Manfred Bockelmann is a non-profit educational art project which has received international attention, including its inaugural exhibition at the Leopold Museum in Vienna in 2013 and its exhibition at Deutscher Bundestag in Berlin to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2015.
ABOUT THE SHOW
Over 36 portraits memorialize children and youths aged between two and 18 when they fell victim to the Nazi terror. The series is based on “police” shots showing Jewish, Roma and Sinti children as well as victims of euthanasia. They wear the infamous broad-striped convicts’ suits and have shaved heads. Others, mainly Roma and Sinti, who were asked to report to the authorities for a photocall, wear their best clothes, eager to make a good impression, while their faces are marked by uncertainty. With these portraits, Bockelmann seeks to create “signposts against forgetting” and desires to “give faces to at least a few names and numbers, lifting a few individuals out of the anonymity of statistics.” The artist’s aim to draw “against oblivion” stands testament not only to these young people who have a name and a biography but also to the values of an empathic human sympathy. The project aims to make beholders aware of their own humanity, not only with respect to the past but also to the present.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Painter and photographer Manfred Bockelmann was born in 1943, a time when millions of people including hundreds of thousands of children were killed in the Holocaust. Contemplating his 70th birthday, he began the project Drawing Against Oblivion, creating over 120 portraits of children to date. Bockelmann lives and works in Carinthia, Austria and Munich, Germany.
More information:
www.stockton.edu/artgallery
Stockton University will host two special events related to the exhibition on Oct. 26.
For further information, please go to
https://acfny.org/event/drawing-against-oblivion-by-manfred-bockelmann-panel-discussion-film-screening/
VENUE
Stockton University Art Gallery
101 Vera King Farris Drive, Galloway, NJ 08205-9441