Usta (Lips)

Erna Rosenstein is known for her eerie paintings with collaged elements and dramatic use of color and light. The brutal murder of her parents in 1942, which occurred after the family’s escape from the Lwów Ghetto during WW2, is a recurrent theme in her oeuvre. Here, the painted image of two lips, sown together by actual thread stitched into the canvas, manifests the silence of trauma and repression. Rosenstein was influenced by the visual vocabulary of Surrealism, yet was also aware of its political implications, as a style that was fiercely oppressed by the post-war Communist Party in Poland.