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The Arts Intel Report

Stéphane Mandelbaum

Stéphane Mandelbaum, Composition (mask figure), c. 1981.

Nov 10, 2023 – Feb 18, 2024
35 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013

As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, it’s not surprising that the Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum, born in 1961, was haunted by Nazis in his dreams and found them entering his artworks. Mandelbaum died young, murdered in 1987, age 25. Small sketches and larger portraits bring his intergenerational trauma into compositions that feature such people as Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Röhm as well as himself. The chaos is palpable, embodied in a vortex of images drawn, clipped from magazines, and mixed with text in French, Yiddish, Italian, and German. The result is a haunting narrative, pulled directly from the artist’s agitated unconscious. —Lucy Horowitz