1945
The Second World War
Born in 1940 into a Jewish family from Eastern Europe, with parents who survived the extermination camps, Zlotykamien was deeply affected from the outset by this violence and injustice, which fueled his work.
Throughout his life, whether faced with Hiroshima, genocides, Vietnam, apartheid, terrorist attacks, or the war in Ukraine, the artist was always deeply affected. Why does humanity persist in destroying itself in this way?
1963
The street to fight censorship
In 1963, Gérard Zlotykamien participated in the 3rd Paris Biennale as part of the group “L'Abattoir,” initiated by Eduardo Arroyo. He presented three works, one of which depicted disemboweled dictators on display in a museum. One of these political figures, on an official visit, had the work censored. Zlotykamien, shocked, declared that he would never paint for museums again. Thus, he chose the street as a space for freedom and resistance. His silhouettes, the “Ephemerals,” became urban memorials against oblivion.
A pioneer of street art, he would disguise himself to paint, was the first to be convicted, but never gave up. During a trial in Germany, he declared: “I will erase my works when you give me back mine.” Acquitted, he became a symbol of artistic resistance.
1965
Rue des Rosiers
The art of Zlotykamien, or these delicate, ephemeral forms, feels like the drawings a four-year-old might scrawl, as if each sketch were the only memory that remained of the family lost to the war. They hover between presence and absence, fragile traces of love and loss, like ghosts pressed onto paper, holding onto a world that vanished before he could fully know it. Each line trembles with the echo of what once was, and what can never return.
Galerie Mathgoth1977
“Effacements”
Disappearance permeates Zlotykamien's work, haunted by a family history. In 1977, at the Charley Chevalier Gallery, he unveiled fifteen “Éphémères,” only to cover them in black before the audience in a radical gesture he called “Effacement.” The black, dense and absolute, evokes carbon, death, and the cinders left in the wake of fire, transforming absence into a tangible presence. In this act, erasure becomes memory, and the void itself bears witness. In 2024, the Centre Pompidou acquired one of the fifteen works from this seminal exhibition, cementing its place in the canon of post-war European art.
1995
“Ashes”
In the series Ashes, Gérard Zlotykamien burns his paintings to collect their ashes, which he then encloses in jars. Through this ritualized act of destruction, the artist transforms disappearance into a tangible material, weaving a dialogue between presence and absence, memory and erasure. The jars, fragile and dark, seem to bear the weight of silent traces, vestiges of erased beings and gestures, evoking the echo of collective loss and forgetting. Each fragment becomes a mute testimony, a space of contemplation where art preserves what history has tried to obliterate.
2024
The Pompidou Center
History proved him right: in 2024, the Pompidou Center honored his work by adding eight of his pieces to its collection. This gesture marked the recognition of an art form that was once illegal but has now become part of our heritage, proving that an act of transgression can convey a lasting political message.
