Maryan
Pinchas Burstein, a.k.a. “MARYAN”, was an artist who was born in Polonia in 1927 and died in the USA in 1977.
The irony in Maryan’s paintings coexists with the depth of his biographical character, which defined his entire career. Born in Poland in the years before World War II, he was imprisoned in a concentration camp at the age of 12, where he lost a leg and became an orphan. This experience, as well as the new works of Dubuffet, Picasso, Karel Appel and others, inspired him to develop a very personal work of art in parallel with the artistic movements of the postwar period.
Selected artworks
Maryan
Dog, 1969
Oil on canvas, 76.8 x 61 cm
Maryan
Personnage (Napoléon), 1971
Colored chalk on paper, 60 x 48 cm
Maryan
Personnage, 1963
Oil on canvas, 127 x 126.8 cm
Maryan
Two personnages on a table, 1969
Oil on canvas, 132.2 x 162.6 cm
Maryan
Tête, 1958
Oil on canvas, 81 x 65.5 cm
Maryan
Untitled, 1964
Oil on canvas, 127 x 127 cm
Maryan
Composition, 1954
Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm
Maryan
Personnage, 1971
Gouache, paper, canvas, 56 x 76 cm
Maryan
Personnage Napoléon, 1973
Wax and oil on paper, 101.6 x 81 cm
Maryan
Untitled, 1967
Oil on canvas, 89 x 76.5 cm
Maryan
Untitled, 1968
Gouache on paper, 17.9 x 26 cm
Installation views
Catalogue
Excerpt
“A survivor of Auschwitz, and thus perhaps liberated at least from the compulsion to debate the limits between what is “unrepresentable” and what is “speakable” as he probed those limits in the flesh in his own experience, Maryan used his right to scream and exercised it in full […]”
Adam Szymczyk