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TRANSPORT:
Works by
Henk Pander & Esther Podemski
January 19 - May 20, 2012
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 5:30-7:30pm
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In Transport–Works by Henk Pander and Esther Podemski, the artists use World War II as the backdrop from which to explore the remembered realities of wartime. Dutch born Pander’s work delves into the world of his difficult and dangerous childhood. Podemski grew up in Portland listening to her parent’s tales of surviving ghettos, concentration camps, and a daring post-war escape. Both artists root their connection to the past in childhood memories and family connections. Pander and Podemski explore complex relationships–between time and memory and truth and the subjectivity of the mind–with intellectual rigor and brilliant rendering.
About the artists:
Henk Pander, Haarlem Transport, watercolor,
40” x 60”, 2001
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Henk Pander was born in 1937, in Haarlem in the Netherlands. His father was an artist who specialized in Bible illustrations. His childhood was deeply marked by the experience of growing up during World War II, and the German occupation of the Netherlands. Dramatic memories of his family’s fear, deprivation, and the violence around them became the source for his highly
personal style of history painting that was to emerge decades later.
Pander studied at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His artistic character was shaped by the academic training he received there, as well as by the Dutch tradition of painting, with its devotion to representing the visible world. After graduating in 1961, Pander received a commission from the Dutch government to document the changing face of Amsterdam. His own art during this period involved dark ink wash drawings with an existential melancholy that Pander connects with the work of Goya. In 1965 marriage led Pander to Portland. The artist’s sense of dislocation, of being separated from his original family and culture, and set loose in contemporary America, has given his works some of its specific psychic gravity.
Pander’s work has been the subject of more than 40 solo exhibitions, including those at the Portland Art Museum in 2001, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 2004 and the Hallie Ford Museum in 2011. His work is in many public collections, and recently over 100 of the artist’s sketchbooks, drawings, and etchings have been acquired by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
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Esther Podemski, Night Sky Steam, Mixed Media, Oil on Panel, 20 x26 inches, 2010
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Esther Podemski was born in Poland in 1946. Her father Max survived the Lodz Ghetto and two concentration camps, Maidanek and Birkennau. Her mother Anna also survived the Lodz Ghetto as well as Auschwitz, Soffenwalder and Stutthof concentration camps.
When the Russians tried to take over the tailoring business in 1950, Max, with his wife and two small children, walked out of the country and traveled through Europe illegally finally entering Israel. Finding no need for a tailor in Israel, he and his family traveled back to Germany where he waited in a displaced persons camp for the immigrations barriers to lift, and made his to America by ship in 1952.Podemski is a visual artist who produced and directed the acclaimed documentary House of the World about the Holocaust’s aftermath in Poland.
The film premiered at Lincoln Center in New York and has since screened in Europe, traveled throughout the United States with the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, and screened at the Los Angeles International Jewish Film Festival. The Discovery Channel and the Jewish Broadcast Network purchased the film.As a painter, Esther Podemski has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in public and private collections. She is a recipient of a painting fellowship from the New York State Council on the Arts and twice participated in the Yaddo residency program.
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Transport Cinema Screenings
House of the World A film by Esther Podemski
Sun, January 22 at 2:00pm
Ahead of Time The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber
Wed, February 22 at 12:00pm & Thurs, February 23 at 7:00pm
Painted Life A film about Henk Pander by Jacob Pander
Wed, March 21 at 12:00pm & Thurs, March 22 at 7:00pmGeneral
Public: $10; Members: $8 While 50 seats last.
Reservations at www.ojm.org or call 503-226-3600
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www.oj
