Art as Refuge: Sketches and Insights on the Jewish-Polish Art Scene from a Refugee’s Perspective

The works of Maurice Gottlieb and Samuel Hirszenberg express corporeal wandering and psychological ambulation characteristic of the refugee condition. The third artistic stratagem emerges in the works of the copper artist Arieh Merzer. His work embodies a liminal form of movement, an elusive dynamism etched into metallic surfaces. This interstitial motion is situated between the external and internal realms, occupying the depth of the relief medium that stands between painting and sculpture, engaging the world while simultaneously withdrawing from it. Merzer’s aesthetic thereby exemplifies the intricate dialectic of the refugee experience, one alternately characterized by an inexorable sense of displacement and entrapment in a Penrose-like perpetual movement that can lead to new creative expressions. His art is an art as refuge.