Gerda Meyer-Bernstein

Gerda Meyer-Bernstein (* 1924 in Hagen ), resident in Chicago , is an internationally renowned American artist of German origin who, among other things, artistically deals with the Holocaust .

At the age of thirteen she was already active in the Jewish underground in Germany and was preparing for a life in the kibbutz . 15-year-old Gerda experienced the horrors of the Holocaust up close in her home country when she and her family had to hide on the roof of their house from the attacks by the Nazis during the November pogroms on November 9, 1939 . In the same year she was brought to safety on one of the last Kindertransportes from Germany to England, where her immediate family could still flee; her grandmother, aunt, and uncles did not survive the Holocaust. In 1940 her family moved with her to the United States , where she was granted US citizenship in 1948.

She has been exhibiting her artistic work regularly since 1954, and is best known for her approximately 25 large room installations that she has created since the 1970s. In her work, Gerda Meyer-Bernstein deals intensively with “ racism, sexism, censorship and political murder ”, “ the inhumanity of people in relation to people ” (“ Sexism, censorship, political killings ... Man's inhumanity to man ”).

Works

• Homage of Raoul Wallenberg (1972)
• Procession (1981)
• Garden of Eden (1981-82)
• Requiem (1983)
• Vietnam Memorial (1983)
• From the Ashes (1985-86)
• Block 11 (1989)
• Hooded March (1992)
• Volcano (1993)
• Passages (1996)
• Witness and Legacy (1997)
• Windows
• The 8th Deadly Sin
• Civil Rights Now
• Freedom March

swell

• Witness & Legacy
• Press release Kunsthaus Potsdam
• Opening speech Potsdam (PDF file; 24 kB)