Roger Lee of Parndon Mill in Harlow, who exhibited her work and knew sculptor Gerda Rubinstein personally, will be in conversation with Monica Bohm-Duchen, art historian and founding director of Insiders/Outsiders, to introduce us to the touching life story and artistic evolution of this still little-known woman émigré sculptor.
This talk, given by the sculptor’s daughter, Antonia Salmon who is also an artist, will explore Charlotte Mayer’s early years growing up in Prague and the impact on her life of her experience of being a child refugee when she came to the UK in 1939 at the age of ten.
This talk is held at Kormis’s public sculpture, the Memorial in Memory of Prisoners of War and Victims of Concentration Camps 1914-1945 and is organised in partnership with the Friends of Gladstone Park.
This exhibition talk will explore Fred Kormis’ memorial to prisoners of war and victims of concentration camps, arguing that reconstructing the biography of the Dollis Hill memorial as a site of creative and disruptive practice helps us understand the long, complex, and ongoing histories of Holocaust memorialisation in the UK.
When Fritz (later Fred) Kormis arrived in England (via Holland) in 1934 he was among more than 300 artists, around one-sixth of them sculptors, who found refuge from Nazism in Britain. This talk situates Kormis within this wider context and among a cohort of refugee sculptors who included Benno Elkan, Georg Ehrlich and Willi Soukop, among many others.
Based on the extraordinary evidence of woodcut prints made by Fred Kormis as a prisoner of war in Siberia, this exhibition talk explores the context of printmaking around 1918. Highlighting the cathartic process of woodcut printing for fellow sculptors and graphic artists Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz, it considers the qualities of this spare graphic medium that make it suited to the direct expression of existential extremes.
Anita Peleg speaks on behalf of Generation 2 Generation about the sculptor, Naomi Blake. Part of our Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century series of exhibition events.
An exhibition event in partnership with Insiders/Outsiders. Aurelia Young will trace Oscar Nemon’s (1906-1985) dramatic journey across Europe from his home in Croatia to seek refuge from the Nazis in England in the 1930s.
In this talk, Barbara Warnock and Helen Lewandowski will explore the genesis and development of the Fred Kormis: Sculpting the Twentieth Century exhibition, from the deposit of the Fred Kormis Collection at the Wiener Library shortly after Kormis’ death in 1986, to its rediscovery by Library staff in recent years, and the process of the curation of the exhibition. They will discuss the collection and the themes explored in the exhibition.
