Erna Rosenstein’s haunted imagery returns to Vienna in a major Belvedere survey
A painter, poet, and assemblage artist shaped by war, loss, and displacement, Polish artist Erna Rosenstein (1913-2004) is the focus of a major exhibition at the Belvedere in Vienna. Titled On the Other Side of Silence, the survey traces how Rosenstein transformed personal catastrophe into a visual language that remains unsettlingly alive: part Surrealism, part biomorphic abstraction, part figuration, and entirely her own.
The show has the feel of a homecoming. Rosenstein was born in Lviv in 1913, then part of Poland and now in Ukraine, studied in Vienna in the early 1930s, and later returned to Kraków, where she moved in left-wing avant-garde circles. During the Nazi occupation, she survived by hiding under false identities and fleeing across Poland. The war left little documentary evidence of her early work, but it left a lasting mark on her art. She also witnessed the murder of her parents, a trauma that became central to her practice for the rest of her life.
Curator Stephanie Auer says Rosenstein’s work is defined by a lifelong engagement with that loss. For more than five decades, she returned to the image of her parents as severed, floating, portrait-like heads, sometimes embedded in narrative scenes, sometimes isolated, sometimes drifting through surreal landscapes. The repetition is not merely biographical. It gives the work its emotional charge, turning memory into something unstable, fragmentary, and insistently present.
One key work in the exhibition, the 1951 painting Screens, suggests that method with particular clarity. A blue rectangle hovers in a nocturnal forest, functioning like a screen or projection surface. Within it appear the hands and faces of Rosenstein’s parents. Auer describes the device as a way of separating the scene from ordinary space and placing it in the realm of imagination, while also evoking the shifting, recurring nature of memory itself.
The Belvedere presentation also reflects Rosenstein’s renewed international visibility. She appeared at Documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017 and was included in Surrealism Beyond Borders, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2021 and traveled to Tate Modern in 2022. That attention feels especially resonant now, as museums continue to grapple with how to preserve memory when the historical record survives only in fragments.
At a moment when war and displacement again shadow Europe, Rosenstein’s work reads with renewed urgency. On the Other Side of Silence is on view at Lower Belvedere, Vienna, from July 3 to January 10, 2027.
