Exhibition: A Door into the Past – Paintings for my Mother

It was triggered by my mother Hildegard Basch’s late-life unburdening to me of memories of her formative years in pre-war Berlin. My study has become a 25 year excavation, it re-enacts a piecing together of maternal testimony, traces and archival evidence to enter a lost world and reclaim something of the lives of the family who perished before I was born.

‘He explained to me that neither a tourist visa nor emigration visa would be given to non-Aryans in Germany, unless they had special protection and had confirmation from the foreign office. And even then, nowadays there would hardly be a reasonable chance. I said – and how come that yet still a number of people manage to go over there? He said either through protection or via foreign countries. I said he should at least give me a hint how I could get there via a foreign country.’
from a letter to Hildegard‘s Grandfather Felix Berlowitz 18th October 1938