Color pastels on board, 1980. 450x340 mm; 17 3/4x13 3/8 inches. Signed in pastel, lower center recto.
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné currently in preparation by Dr. Julia Drost.
Provenance: Claude Bernard Gallery, Ltd., New York and Paris, with the label and copy of the purchase receipt; Estate of Bruce Cohen, Washington, D.C.
According to the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, which organized a posthumous retrospective of the work of Szafran (1934-2019), he "Occupies a very singular place in the history of art in the second half of the 20th century. He has dedicated his work to a figurative and poetic-iconic approach to reality that he has developed far from the art world and its fads, in the seclusion of the studio. A particularly difficult childhood, marked by the disasters of World War II in a family of Jewish-Polish origin, led him to prefer this solitude, focusing on his own existence and inner states to give rise to his favorite themes. The parsimonious economy of the representations is counterbalanced by a fever of bewitching experimentation, which functions as an anchor cast into art history. As a self-taught artist of inexhaustible curiosity, he was introduced to pastel and then watercolor, fields of artistic exploration he ardently pursued. Szafran challenges the viewer's gaze, distorting and deconstructing perspective, in enclosed places, hermetically sealed on themselves. With time, these open up, fragmenting to give rise to exploded visions in which planes of temporality are multiplied and where spaces combine and confront each other, symbolic of an order that is forever lost."
