Norman L. Kleeblatt

Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art features the work by thirteen internationally recognized artists who use imagery from the Nazi era to explore the nature of evil. Their works are a radical departure from previous art about the Holocaust, which centred on tragic images of victims. Instead, these artists dare to invite the viewer into the world of the perpetrators. The viewer, therefore, faces an unsettling moral dilemma: How is one to react to these menacing and indicting images, drawn from a history that can never be forgotten? The artists represented in Mirroring Evil impel us to examine what these images of Nazism might mean in our lives today.

Essays in the catalogue explore themes of moral ambiguity in makers and viewers of art, institutional responsibility in exhibiting controversial artworks, and the complicated issues of representing or even imagining the perpetrators. Entries about the individual artworks discuss in greater depth the artistic, ethical, and historical complexity of the images that the artists dare to engage.

Contributions include essays by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, Reesa Greenberg, Norman L. Kleeblatt, Lisa Saltzman, Ellen Handler Spitz, Ernst van Alphen, and a foreword by James E. Young. Artists include Boaz Arad, Christine Borland, Mat Callishaw, Rudolf Herz, Elke Krystufek, Mischa Kuball, Zbigniew Libera, Roee Rosen, Tom Sachs, Alan Schechner, Alain Séchas, Maciej Toporowicz, and Piotr Uklánski.

Norman L. Kleeblatt is the Susan and Elihu Rose Curator of Fine Arts at The Jewish Museum in New York. He has organized exhibitions such as John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the Wertheimer Family and Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional Identities.… (altro)