Marion Anna Simon
Gemaltes Kaddisch
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Doris Hansmann, Fotini Ladaki |
| Design | Kaisers Ideenreich |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Size | 12 x 18 cm |
| Pages | 144 |
| Illustrations | 121 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-50-0 |
An artist paints the Kaddish
In roughly 330 self-portraits, Marion Anna Simon (b. 1972, Bitburg; lives and works in Cologne) dares to undertake an unusual transcription of Jewish prayer as a sign of mourning. On January 7, 2017, one day after the death of her mother, Marion Anna Simon began work on her painted Kaddish. What initially began as a very personal process of grieving quickly developed into an artistic concept: Roughly 330 painted and drawn self-portraits were created within eleven months—in daily notes, with acrylic and watercolor, pencil and ballpoint pen, oil crayon and pastel, on paper and canvas, wallpaper and cardboard, in lined exercise books and cheap notepads. Marion Anna Simon’s cycle explores her own face as a place of mourning and self-affirmation, documenting an artistic ritual beyond the Jewish prohibition of images and patriarchal attributions to sons in the tradition of the sanctification prayer for the memory of the dead.
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By letting it all hang out, they allow us to see ourselves as we are instead of presenting a picture of what we (supposedly) should be like. The insolence of it!
