Tibor Spitz: A Retrospective: Stories, Remembrances

Artist: Tibor Spitz

Duration: Aug 14, 2022 - Sept 18, 2022

Join us for the Opening Reception: Sun. Aug 14th, 4 PM – 6 PM at our community gallery space, 68 Mtn Rest In New Paltz.

Unison Arts is proud to present a retrospective exhibition of paintings and works in ceramics by artist, storyteller, scientist, and Holocaust Survivor, Tibor Spitz. We invite our community across the Hudson Valley to join us on Sunday, August 14th, for the opening reception of this six-week exhibition to witness and celebrate Tibor's journey from dispossession and horror to freedom and healing through community-based art.

The paintings on view tell the story of Tibor’s and his family’s suffering and survival. They tell the story of the shared traumas of a people. The works in ceramics translate and fortify the material and narrative gesture of Tibor’s paintings. Sculptural forms suggesting portraits of loved ones specify and individuate the experience of suffering of exemplary individuals, the distressed mother, the loving matronly neighbor, the Rabbi bearing witness, the horrified father figure. Together the works tell the story of a people and a family witnessing their suffering, memories turned to works of art that offer a redemptive account of survival, grace, and light in darkness.

Tibor’s story, as a result of the collaborative effort between the community arts organization SageArts and Jewish Family Service of Orange County, was recently featured in the PBS documentary film, "We Remember: Songs of Survivors," created by local filmmakers Ilene Cutler, Tim Miller and Tim Guetterman will be screened on the show’s closing on September 18, 2022, as a part of Unison’s community-based programming.

Come witness the extraordinary beauty of Tibor’s work. Celebrate the life of this 92-year old artist. Study his paintings and ceramic works up close and feel the power of his message –a message of survival, of spirituality, of beauty, of despair and yes, of hope.

In Tibor's words: 

"My works convey my experience.

I am a survivor of Holocaust. I am a survivor of regimes that tore my country apart and turned it fascist. Most of my family and friends were murdered by the Nazi regime. Along with Noemi, my wife of more than 50 years and also a Holocaust survivor, I am a refugee in a tumultuous world. 

When Nazi soldiers attacked my Czechoslovakian village, I was only 12 years old. My family and I escaped to the forest and there we hid and survived underground for 7 months. We later hid in the nearby mountains. We survived. 

I wanted to become an artist, but the postwar Czechoslovakian government forced me to study chemistry to help the government make more stable arms and weapons. I studied ceramics sciences and worked for a lifetime for a government that oppressed me and my loved ones. It was only after I escaped  to the West with my wife, that I was able to return to the arts. I enrolled in night courses in drawing, painting and sculpture, and a lifetime later finally became a full-time artist. This was 25 years ago; since then I have told my story of suffering in my many paintings, in my many lectures, and through collaborations in song with friends like filmmakers Ilene Cutler and Tim Miller and many others across the Hudson Valley. 

I later started to make sculptures. They seemed to help express and translate my trauma in more ways than writing, lecturing, and painting had done. Turning clay and broken greenware vessels into art helped to enhance the material means I had to convey my story. They helped relieve me of my distressing memories. As sculptural works of art, they powerfully presented the story of my experience of Holocaust. Making art has always been a source of emotional redemption and healing from my nightmare memories of totalitarian regimes, but the ceramic works helped to almost restore life to my murdered and vanished beloved family. They seem to keep my loved ones from being forgotten and erased in the world–though I have found it impossible to forget them. 

These works refer back to all the lives I've lived, the experience of shared trauma, of ritual, of practiced study of painting and song, and the revelatory, healing language of art shared as reflections of all our tragic, heroic and loving experiences in all our diverse communities."

Unison's programming is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.