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The Arts Intel Report

My Name is Maryan

Dec 9, 2021 – Mar 20, 2022
770 NE 125th St, North Miami, FL 33161, United States

Maryan S. Maryan’s early painting Crematorium at Auschwitz (1949) depicts an expressionistic tangle of greenish limbs, grasping hands, reptilian faces, and the flames of an incipient furnace. It was created in Israel when the artist, who was born in Poland in 1927 and miraculously survived Auschwitz (though not without losing a leg), still called himself Pinchas Burstein. The painting was one of several Holocaust-themed pictures that featured in the young Burstein’s first solo exhibition, in Jerusalem in 1950. Later during that decade, Maryan, who was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, changed his name to rid himself from the persecution the Nazis had attached to it, but he would always be shadowed by the Shoah. The early paintings, signed “Burstein,” are included in “My Name Is Maryan,” a sweeping retrospective organized by Alison M. Gingeras. After it’s run in Miami, the exhibition travels to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, opening in March 2023. —Tobias Grey

Maryan S. Maryan, “Crematorium at Auschwitz,” 1949. Collection of Mr. Assaph Caspi, Tel Aviv, Israel.