To know oneself through memory is a source of creative power. Because culture and identity are entwined, it becomes the responsibility of the artist to examine the ways that culture effects artistic identity and choice. I am from a family of Jews who have made many cultures their home, and the experience of my Jewishness contrasting with the mores and traditions of adopted homelands has always been the theme most pertinent to my painting. Each artist must choose how deeply her art is going to address the discrepancy between them memory of the past and the experience of the present. This tension becomes a metaphor to express the relationship between the inner world of the emotions and the outer world of social interchanges. The past is a screen through which our present filters. In 1933, my family emigrated from Berlin to Stockholm to escape from growing anti-Semitism in Germany. The part of my family that did not relocate to Sweden escaped to Mexico, and it was there that I was partially raised. Memories of being a Jewish child in Mexico inform my work, but in recent years I have become increasingly preoccupied with my European origins, and particularly Sweden. My father was born at Sofia Sjukhuset in Stockholm, but my Grandmother left Sweden in 1938 to begin a new life with her husband and baby son in Mexico. Her mother and two sisters stayed in Sweden. They stayed in close contact with my Grandmother. I ran through the Mexican garden wearing painted clogs sent to me by my Great Aunts and heard my Grandmother shouting Swedish into the telephone each Sunday. Often, my Grandmother would tell me the story of her family’s flight from Germany, and her consequent experiences as a schoolgirl in Stockholm. From early in my childhood, Mexico and Sweden became associated with the concept of sanctuary, along with the knowledge of loss and of nostalgia that the necessity for asylum creates. Therefore, when I paint, I try to reconcile the poetic ideals of Mexico and of Sweden with my family’s experiences in Germany.
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