Ghitta Caiserman-Roth began her art career at the age of thirteen, when she received an honourable mention in the Annual Spring Exhibition of the Art Association of Montréal. Her painting rarely moves into the purely abstract, yet her figurative work is highly concerned with composition, light, colour and texture, often using the repetition of patterns to highlight the relationships between figurative subjects. In the early 1940s Caiserman-Roth was influenced by teacher Harry Sternberg, who encouraged her to address social concerns. This encouragement was also flamed by her experience working in war factories in Montréal during the summers, and a move to a working-class area of Halifax in 1945. At this time her imagery centred around working class life. Returning to Montréal in 1947, she and Alfred Pinsky opened the Montréal Artists School with artists Barbara Eckhart and Harold Goodwin. A trip to Mexico in 1948 exposed her to the socialist mural movement, and she began incorporating mural forms into her work, once again exploring socialist themes. In 1950 she won an O’Keefe Award for her painting, Cityscape. During the 1950s, she was preoccupied with interior scenes and still life, the window becoming a major focus in her work, symbolic at once of freedom and a kind of alienation. She continued to address the themes of family and still lifes in the 1960s, also commenting on religious/social concerns in work such as Riot (Am I My Brother’s Keeper?) (1966) and Deposition (1966). During the 1970s, her treatment of objects moved from expressionism to a more surrealist treatment, as she juxtaposed them using a free association in work like Analogy (1970) and Time Tapestry (1973). Her use of objects such as rumpled beds and empty garden furniture continued her exploration of the symbolic and sensual qualities of everyday things. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s her work has continued to dwell on the themes mentioned and a variety of others, her drawing and painting becoming increasingly abstract through an overlapping and reworking of forms, and adding printmaking techniques to her range of media. The female body is a consistent subject, often combined with textile patterns, clothing or unclothing upon the canvas. She has also, chiefly during the 1990s, revived the theme of dolls that she began in the 1970 work Analogy, this time with more specific references to death and destruction. She explains the connection between dolls and death this way: "During a long-forgotten walk along a sunlit street . . . . I see all the outdoor stairways and it’s an absolutely idyllic Fall day and from a distance I get a kind of shock. I see what looks like a terrible accident and the mood of the day is destroyed. I fearfully walk toward it and it turns out to be a whole lot of dolls scattered along the street." Having grown up with a girl named Nella, whose family were lost in the Holocaust, and who was adopted by Caiserman-Roth’s parents after her father met the girl in Lodz where he was general secretary of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the artist has used dolls frequently as images of death, sometimes incorporating them with numbers that signify, in part, concentration camp serial numbers. An exhibition of her "flung dolls" was held in Germany in 1995. Having taught at Concordia University and the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montréal, as well as briefer stays at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Caiserman-Roth is the winner of numerous awards, including the Canadian Centennial Medal, Canada Council Purchase Awards, the 1975 Purchase Prize and Best Graphic Image Award at the Ontario Society of Artists, the Ninth Annual Award for the Arts, I. J. Segal Fund, and the Living Nature 86 Prize. She is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, the Conseil des artistes peintres du Québec, and the Conseil québecois de l’estampe.

http://art-history.concordia.ca/eea/artists/caiserman-roth.html

Title: Windowscape

Date: n.d.

Medium: serigraph print

Edition: 17/20

Accession no: 976.08

Purchase award from Graphex 4