Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art
by Jewish Museum (New York, N.Y.)
Category: Art

Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art features the work by thirteen internationally recognized artists who use imagery from the Nazi era to explore the nature of evil. Their works are a radical departure from previous art about the Holocaust, which centered on tragic images of victims. Instead, these artists dare to invite the viewer into the world of the perpetrators. The viewer, therefore, faces an unsettling moral dilemma: How is one to react to these menacing and indicting images, drawn from a history that can never be forgotten? The artists represented in Mirroring Evil impel us to examine what these images of Nazism might mean in our lives today. Essays in the catalogue explore themes of moral ambiguity in makers and viewers of art, institutional responsibility in exhibiting controversial artworks, and the complicated issues of representing or even imagining the perpetrators. Entries about the individual artworks discuss in greater depth the artistic, ethical, and historical complexity of the images that the artists dare to engage.