The exhibition, which has been open since January 27 at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, is part of the Man and Catastrophe project, timed to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of the prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp. For one of the most famous artists in modern Belgium, Jan Vanrita, this topic is deeply personal: many members of his family have experienced repression. In particular, the artist's own mother and uncle, as members of the Resistance movement, went through the camps. And if the young girl managed to survive, then her twin brother died soon after his release from the concentration camp: in his memory there are several photographs and a family legend about how he loved to play the accordion as a boy. For the artist, the image of his mother's brother has forever merged with this musical instrument - one of the most famous paintings by Vanrit is "Portrait of an Uncle", where an accordion is depicted instead of a face. Its stretched furs are "fitted" with faceless barrack windows, a staircase trampled by thousands of feet, and a chimney, the thick smoke from which leaves no hope. Now this canvas can be seen in Moscow, and for the authors of the exposition - architects Sergei Tchoban and Agnia Sterligova - it became the starting point in the development of the exhibition design.
Forty pictorial portraits - part of Vanrith's grandiose series Losing Face, based on black-and-white protocol photographs of prisoners - are housed in a dull introverted volume, the inner walls of which are painted dark gray, and the outer walls are speckled with the names of the victims of Dossin Barracks. The main array of names is applied in light gray paint, and only a few are highlighted in a darker font - the meaning of this message from the architects is obvious: millions disappeared in the Holocaust, and only some of the victims have survived at least some information.
In terms of the exposition space is a trapezoid - its sides are assembled with an accordion, the "folds" of which are pulled to the narrow end with the "Uncle's Portrait", making this canvas the semantic epicenter of the entire exposition. However, such a compositional solution had another, no less important prototype: "The plan of the Bakhmetyevsky garage itself, in which the Jewish Museum is located, is based on a similar comb principle, and it was very important for us to pay tribute to the architecture of Konstantin Melnikov with our project," says Sergey Choban.
“In addition, such a shape is an ideal means of enhancing perspective and an incredibly interesting technique for exhibiting paintings,” continues the architect. - Entering the exhibition, the visitor is at first involuntarily completely intrigued by the central canvas, and sees the faces located on the sides only partially and, as it were, in passing. However, as you move along the walls, the portraits gradually unfold, and when you find yourself inside the installation, all these faces look at you, each telling their tragic story. The height of the walls was also optimally found by the authors of the exposition - the four-meter fences visually completely isolate the exhibition from the museum space, multiplying the effect of immersion in the story told by Vanrith.
The final and, perhaps, the most crushing chord in terms of emotional impact is two children's portraits, which the architects placed at the back of the hall they created. These are much larger-scale canvases (1x2 meters, while all adult portraits are made in 40x50 cm format), and literally dominate the exposition. And if all the faces of adult prisoners are, by and large, the stereotyped pictures "head on a white background" embodied in color, then here two boys are captured in full growth. One of them, Hermann, who is at most five years old, is an elegant child who was brought to a photo studio, put on a chair, and given a toy. Only the absence of adults around him (and on the canvas it is unmistakably guessed that they were originally in the photograph) is able to plant a note of alarm in this idyllic picture. The second is his peer Samuel, and his portrait is also written from a photo from everyday life, only a small prisoner of a concentration camp is depicted on it. The visitor catches the difference between the two children at first glance, literally in a split second, and in this moment - the abyss separating life from life a step away from death.
The exhibition "Losing Face" will run until March 1, 2015.
