A chilling portrayal of Nazi death camps|Hannah Arendt called it the “banality of evil” – the notion that evil acts, even those of such unfathomable magnitude as the Holocaust, can unfold with shocking ordinariness.
That, in many ways, is the idea behind “Fourteen Stations,” a gripping, soon-to-close exhibition in the Singer Gallery at the Mizel Center for Arts and Culture.
On view are a series of 14 drawings created from aerial photographs of Nazi concentration camps, including some of the most notorious ones – Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen- Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Treblinka.
In a certain sense, these works seem distant and disconnected, and that is exactly what gives them their power. They are, after all, impersonal images depicting what the Nazis tried to turn into the ultimate act of impersonalness.
The camps look like ordinary industrial sites, and, in many ways, that’s exactly what they were. But inside of mass production, the Nazis found a way to systematize mass murder.
As even a visitor to a concentration camp quickly realizes, it would be impossible for any artwork to come to terms with the enormity and true horror of the Holocaust. And too often, attempts come off as flimsy, shallow and almost embarrassing.
This is especially true for works that try directly to portray or confront what happened in the camps. Ironically, what seems to work better are pieces that indirectly address this subject matter, because it allows more room for the reality to speak for itself and our minds to fill in the ugly details.
This insight helps explain in part why these drawings are so powerful, even though in some ways them seem too removed and innocuous.
The idea for the series came to Arie Alexander Galles in what the artist describes as a “blinding heat,” when he was standing in January 1993 in the Holocaust Memorial Room at a local Jewish community center.
The artist, who now serves as director of creative arts and a professor of painting and drawing at Soka University of America in Aliso Viego, Calif., was then on the faculty of the College at Florham of Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, N.J.
Born in 1944 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Galles spent much of his childhood in Poland before his family immigrated to Israel in 1956 and then came to the United States two years later. During his time in Poland, he heard accounts of the grim events a few years earlier.
“The land on which such suffering took place, where members of my family became ashes in the slaughterhouse of Belzec, was also the flowered field where my friends and I ran and played,” Galles writes in an artist statement.
After his 1993 epiphany, he set about researching Luftwaffe and Allied aerial reconnaissance photographs of the camps. As the artist points out, they were taken by accident in the search by each side in World War II for strategic targets.
He then re-created and slightly abstracted these images, enlarging them to the compelling scale of 4 feet tall and slightly more than 6 feet wide. They are framed in wrought iron, an allusion to the infamous gate welcoming detainees to Auschwitz.
“Harmless as the landscapes themselves appeared, the images bore lethal radiation,” he writes. “Nine years of hovering above these hells changed me.
“I marked paper with charcoal, literally drawing with ashes. And, sometimes, it felt to me that the physical act of drawing gave voice to the unheard screams of the murdered.”
The English title of the project refers to the 14 stations of the cross in Christianity as well as the train stations near every concentration camp. Each image is accompanied by moving, often biting poetry by Jerome Rothenberg.
Together, the images and texts, first presented in 2002 at the Morris Museum in Morristown, N.J., create a kind of meditation chamber.
They offer another opportunity to reflect, remember and take seriously those simple but forceful words, “never again.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
“Fourteen Stations”
ART EXHIBITION|Charcoal drawings of concentration camps by Arie Alexander Galles|Singer Gallery, Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, 350 S. Dahlia St.|Free|9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays; through June 24; 303-316-6360 or
