Erna Rosenstein

Erna Rosenstein (1913, Lviv - 2004, Warsaw) was a painter, draughtswoman and poet of Jewish origin - one of the leading figures of Polish Surrealism. She studied at the Wiener Frauenakademie (1932-1934) and the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts (1934-1936, under Wojciech Weiss), belonging to the pre-war Kraków Group, in whose circle her friendship with Jonasz Stern was especially close. During the war she was in the Lviv ghetto and witnessed the murder of her parents - this trauma marked all her later work. From 1949 she lived in Warsaw, where she married the critic and translator Artur Sandauer.

In 1957 Rosenstein co-created the reactivated Kraków Group, maintaining close contacts with the Warsaw galleries Krzywe Koło and Foksal. Her work - personal, poetic and free of any constraints - is situated within the limits of broadly understood Surrealism, but bears a strong individual imprint. The central theme is memory: deformed figures, organic, dream-like forms and assemblages and objects built from scraps - stamps, bottle caps, buttons, matchboxes - in the spirit of the Surrealist ennobling of the worthless.

She was also a poet: she made her debut with the volume „A Trace” (1972), and also wrote fairy tales. A breakthrough in her reception was the exhibition at the Zachęta in Warsaw (1967), whose spatial arrangement was prepared by Tadeusz Kantor. In recent years Rosenstein's work has undergone an international revaluation: in 2021 the renowned Hauser & Wirth gallery showed her monographic exhibition „Once Upon a Time” in New York (and then in Zurich), restoring the artist's place in the history of the world avant-garde; in 2024 her works were included in the exhibition „Surrealism. Other Myths” at the National Museum in Warsaw.