Gallery Network

How Gershon Iskowitz Forged His Own Path to Abstraction

In Toronto, Caviar20 follow Iskowitz’s transformation from figurative painter processing Holocaust trauma to pioneer of Canadian abstraction in new career-spanning retrospective.

Gershon Iskowitz, Blue Mauve-C (1980). Courtesy of Caviar20.

Artnet Gallery Network Oct 21, 2026

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Gershon Iskowitz (1919–1988) is a testament to the undying will to create. He spent years in some of the Nazis’ most notorious concentration camps, but the Polish-born artist scavenged the wastelands of Auschwitz and Buchenwald for materials, and he drew. He wasn’t just honing a skill or following a particular artistic movement; he used drawing, he said, as a means of momentary psychological escape from the horrors that surrounded him. He survived.

Iskowitz had been making art before his internment, and he continued to create following his 1945 liberation at Buchenwald.…