The catalogue critically examines the life and work of Polish-born artist Maryan and features more than one hundred key works, including paintings, prints, notebooks, ephemera, photographs, and archival materials.

His biography as a survivor of the Shoah (Holocaust) is essential to an understanding of his work.

Born to Abraham Schindel and Gitla Bursztyn in Nowy Sącz, Poland in 1927, young Pinkas, the artist who came to be known as Maryan, grew up in a traditional, working-class Jewish family. In 1939, Pinkas and his family were captured by the Nazis. Under his mother’s maiden name, Bursztyn, he was imprisoned at various forced labor camps and finally at the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. Pinkas Bursztyn, who survived several near-death experiences, was the sole survivor of his family.

The catalogue reflects on how his personal circumstances altered his evolution as an artist and made him a forerunner of an intersectional politics of human rights.

Published on occasion of the touring exhibition ‘My Name is Maryan’, 17 Nov 2021 – 2 Oct 2022 at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; and also, 20 Dec 2022 – 27 May 2023, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition is curated by Alison Gingeras.

Additional Information (from the MOCA Exhibition Website):

‘My Name Is Maryan’ inserts this complex oeuvre into a larger narrative of postwar European and American art history.

The exhibition restores Maryan’s rightful place in postwar art history—not only chronicling the work of an overlooked artist, but directly linking him to a larger context of his like-minded European and American contemporaries.

Inside images courtesy of MOCA.