I made this decision to sort of open the exhibition with a crescendo, if you will.
The studio that Maryan maintained in the seventies at the Chelsea Hotel was really where
he made some of his most radical and important work and where he was really at the height of his
mature style as a painter and his power. We felt that sort of creating this immersive environment
for the visitor to enter into and really see the kind of optical assault of Maryan's world
in this room that he had created where he hung his paintings floor to ceiling with other art
that he had collected, notably African and Oceanic masks, but also folk objects and popular cultural
things that he collected. We really created this visual universe.
There has not been a deep dive into his practice, specifically not outside a Jewish lens and his
work, for the most part, has gone unknown and under shown. So, this was really an opportunity to
dig, research, and bring together works that have not been exhibited, let alone published before.
I think the way that Alison curated this exhibition was brilliant in that
she deconstructed all the complex layers of Maryan's work. Everything from having
this unique brand of figuration to speaking to his lived experience and trauma, while
also connecting it with a larger human experience and, of course, reinserting him into the canon by
bringing some of his contemporaries literally into the show and creating these beautiful salon-style
installations that are immersive and visually connect Maryan with his contemporaries,
whether or not he knew many of them that are on display here.
Some he had personal relationships with, like H. C. Westermann and
June Leaf. Others, like the COBRA Artists, there's no denying that connectivity visually in the work.
We have an artwork by H. C. Westermann alongside the work of Maryan. While they were friends
in their lifetime, to see these two works alongside one another and the similarities
and the way that they interact with one another is truly one of my favorite moments.
So, in the exhibition, you traverse a series of bodies of work that were really essential to his
vocabulary and his different conceptual concerns. Maryan worked in series. So,
each room that follows is a particular series. So, for example, the following room is a group
of works that he made of these personage, these characters, that were the main thrust
of his figurative practice that he painted in black and white, which was a very particular
part and consistent part of his practice. Those were made in the sixties and, from there, we see
other bodies of work like the "Napoleon Series," where he took the iconic figure of Napoleon and
degraded him and created this sort of, again, turned him into a vessel for his meditation
on the personage and questions of trauma and things that are really unspeakable.
Almost all of the figures have something happening around their mouths. They're emitting something or
taking something in. There's Technicolor sort of streams coming from their mouths
and we realize later in the exhibition, at the very heart of the show, is a series
of galleries that really directly reference his experiences in surviving the Holocaust.
"Ecce Homo" is a film that Maryan made at the end of his life and he made that at the Chelsea Hotel
with fellow artist Kenny Schneider. What it is is a black and white experimental film from the
late seventies where he's giving a testimonial of his experience in the Holocaust. But, at the
same time, he's introducing news and images from the news of that moment. So, we're seeing images
from the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and other images of dictators.
And he is creating this kind of intersectional presentation saying, "I have experienced this.
These things that are happening now, these horrible, genocidal, fascist things that are
happening in my contemporary world are things that I survived." And he really was driven by
this desire to not only speak of what happened to him but to create a connection with other
struggles and I think that this is why I had decided to place this room at the very heart of
the exhibition. I think that his significance is not just as a witness, but as an artist who really
tried to channel the drive to reconstruct oneself and the very notion of human in
all of his paintings and all of his drawings and everything that he wrote and tried to create.
So, I think that his work transcends even its function as a part of the historical record. I
mean, I think he's really a thinker of the struggle to maintain humanity against the
worst odds and the importance of expressing these things in whatever form one can. So,
I think that Maryan is an absolutely contemporary figure in that way, an extremely timely figure.