Gerald Wartofsky: The Song of the Earth surveys seven decades of the nonagenarian artist's still-active practice, presenting his first New York solo exhibition. Rooted in allegorical painting in dialogue with the Renaissance, Wartofsky draws on Mahler, Kabbalistic writings, biblical narrative, modern dance, and twentieth-century literature as material for reinterpretation. A 1976–78 painting responding to Malaparte's La Pelle connects Holocaust imagery directly to Renaissance depictions of the Massacre of the Innocents. The Karin's Garden series traces the progression of his late wife's Alzheimer's and her death in 2011, with disembodied hands — modeled on hers — threading personal grief into broader meditations on mortality and the passage between worlds.
