Herzl Kashetsky: A Prayer for the Dead

For more than 20 years, Saint John artist Herzl Kashetsky has been working on this series of paintings and drawings which represent a personal attempt to come to terms with the events and meaning of the Holocaust. In 1975, Kashetsky included a self-portrait among the faces in a small painting of concentration prisoners, and his spiritual and artistic odyssey eventually led him to visit those camps, and provided the impetus to complete the largely monochromatic photo-derived images that comprise this elegiac exhibition - images of the transport arrivals, of crematoriums and cemeteries, and, most compellingly, images of people, of those who survived and those who did not. Curated for the Beaverbrook Art Gallery by Tom Smart, the exhibition is being circulated by the New Brunswick Museum.