The Terror of Art
INSTALLATION & PAINTING · 1997 · MORI GALLERY, SYDNEY
An installation and a set of paintings dealing with family legacy and war guilt from the Holocaust.
This was a major exhibition in Mori Gallery, Sydney in 1997 which was based around a set of large-scale photographs of myself mimicking the poses that were photographed by Heinrich Hoffmann of Hitler practicing his gestures for his future rallies. They encapsulate rage, hysteria and artifice. There were also a series of family-owned photographs with text written in Hungarian in my father’s hand of memories from the years before, after and during World War II and the extermination of Hungarian Jews. One revelation was that László Endre, one of the leaders of the Hungarian extermination of the Jews and one of the founders of the Arrow Cross Party, was also the person who elevated my grandfather to a position of prominence in the Budapest county office. Endre was later hanged after the war and my grandfather died in his early 50s a refugee, a broken man whose only recourse was religion, emotionally abandoning his family in the last years of his life.
