ART AND POETRY

 

Collaboration of Chava Pressburger with Vera Schwarcz

 

 

IN THE GARDEN OF MEMORY

A conversation in Paper, Poetry, and Print

 

Chava Pressburger and professor Vera Schwarcz met when the Romanian-born Schwarcz, daughter of Holocaust survivors, was doing her research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. "I saw an incredible painting called "Memories". It was a huge, abstract canvas, very striking to me," Schwarcz said. " There is so much overly explicit art about holocaust. This was utterly abstract, so conducive to thought". The painting was done by Chava Pressburger, a native of Prague, who was imprisoned in Terezin with her older brother, writer and poet Petr Ginz (killed in Auschwitz in 1944).

Pressburger's work in this serial are created from the paper she produces herself from plants growing near her home in the Northern Negev and from her garden.

 

"Since our first meeting at Chava's studio in Israel, we have been asking ourselves, "What is the point of doing art when terrible things happen? Can artists say anything at all about the horrific? What is the distinctive power of art?"

 

 (From article of Mara Dresner in the Jewish Ledger)