The Song of the Earth

Allegorical paintings spanning seven decades by nonagenarian Gerald Wartofsky, drawing on classical music, Kabbalistic texts, and personal loss to meditate on cultural transmission and mortality.

Why go

Wartofsky's first New York solo show surveys work rooted in Renaissance painting and modernist expressionism, with recurring motifs—dolls, dead birds, hands—that function as abstractions of the human figure and death itself. The exhibition centers on his engagement with Mahler's *Das Lied von der Erde* and includes the *Karin's Garden* series, made

What to expect

Oil paintings and works on panel ranging from intimate to monumental scale, including the titular *On Gustav Mahler: The Song of the Earth* (1970–75, 42 × 60 inches), *On Curzio Malaparte's 'La Pelle': Holocaust* (1976–78), and the *Karin's Garden* and *Evocation of the Letter Shin* series. Works layer figuration with abstraction, drawing on litera

Things to know

• First solo exhibition in New York by the 91-year-old artist, who studied with George Grosz in the early 1950s and spent formative time in Fl
• Son of Jewish immigrants who escaped pogroms; deeply shaped by childhood awareness of the Holocaust and early visits to the National Gallery
• Taught art for fifty years (1961–2011) at institutions including the Corcoran School of Art, American University, and Georgetown University,
• *Karin's Garden* series traces emotional and temporal progression through his late wife's Alzheimer's and death in 2011; she was a celebrate
• Exhibition titled after *On Gustav Mahler: The Song of the Earth* (1970–75), which reimagines Mahler's song-symphony in visual terms as medi
• Curated by Tony Cox of Club Rhubarb in collaboration with Isabella St. Ivany.