Having studied in both Dublin and Belfast, international Irish artist Thomas Delohery has, over the past 13 years, focussed primarily on one theme in his art practice – the Holocaust.
Not being Jewish, questions have been raised as to why such a subject has dominated his work and his ‘right’ to depict such suffering through art. But Delohery himself highlights the fact that the Holocaust is ‘not just a Jewish catastrophe but a human catastrophe. Not only six million people died in the camps: a part of humanity died with them.’ (The Wicklow News, September 2009)
An ongoing memorial, his work pays tribute to those who perished and honours their courage, suffering, humanity and various ways of resistance.
Holocaust studies
Delohery, who has immersed himself in Holocaust studies, having travelled extensively throughout Europe to the camps and attended intensive courses at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, has more than 40 solo shows to his name. He has exhibited throughout Ireland, challenging audiences in commercial galleries and art centres that believe are removed from the suffering. Anonymous hate mail followed on occasions.
Invitations to exhibit around the world have included the Canadian cities of Toronto and Halifax as well as The Weiner Library in London, the Kunstlerhaus in Munich and the Ojo Centre in Cologne.
Having met his Australian wife, Rebecca, in Jerusalem, Delohery presented his first exhibition in his wife’s country in 2008 in Perth, Western Australia as part of the Interrogating Trauma: Arts and Media responses in Collective Suffering conference.
Shipwrecked in the Death Camps of Europe exhibition, Melbourne
The couple made the decision to leave Ireland and move to Australia and specifically Melbourne, the city of Rebecca’s birth in 2009. The city has the highest concentration of Holocaust survivors in the world outside of Israel and is the home of the biggest Jewish population in Australia.
Shipwrecked In The Death Camps of Europe is Delohery’s debut exhibition in Melbourne, running from 29 March – 23 April 2011 at Tacit Contemporary Art.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the writings of Italian Jewish Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. Liberation of the camps is featured heavily in the works included in the exhibition: Levi talked of liberation being, for him, similar to the idea of being shipwrecked.
More than 30 works are on show at Tacit Contemporary Art. Confronting yet haunting, challenging yet strangely beautiful, the pieces are pencil, watercolour, inks and oil pastel on paper. They provide a certain humanity within the degradation, a human face to the suffering – in direct inverse to the reality of the camps, where tattooed numbers dehumanised individuals, whether man, woman or child.
Delohery’s technical mastery and his highly developed use of colour, whether in the dominant use of red in the portrayal of the soil or the greys and blacks depicting people, provide an almost ‘out-of-focus’ depiction of the everyday events – Washing and Cleaning, The Value of Trade, Attending to the Basics.
It’s colour that also presents the viewer with ‘of now’ rather than ‘of then’. Imagery of the Holocaust is predominantly restricted to black and white, consigned as it were to history and not part of the colour-intense contemporary culture of today. In his exhibition Shipwrecked In The Death Camps of Europe, Delohery follows his determination ‘lest we never forget’ and contemporises, ensuring that the subject is as much about today as it is of the past.
Sources
- Interview with Thomas Delohery by Keith Lawrence, March 2011
- 'Harrowing new art exhibition opens in Bray', The Wicklow News, September 2009
- Jessica Quinn, 'Artist Delohery tackles harrowing part of history', The Clare Champion, September 2009
- Andrew Hamilton, 'The horror and the beauty', The Clare People, January 2010
- Cynthia Gasner, 'Artist's paintings capture Holocaust horrors', The Canadian Jewish News, October 2007
Keith Lawrence - Published writer of articles in magazines, newspapers and websites, predominantly on culture, alongside ghostwriter/editor/copywriter.
