Reflecting the Holocaust

Any gallery with even a partial Jewish sensibility is bound to refer to the Holocaust as a way of remembering its horrible lesson.

That very act of remembering is at the core of the Platt Gallery’s current four-artist show timed in honor of Yom Hashoah, the official Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 2.

Perhaps the art with the most stinging impact is also the most narrative: Barbara Milman’s linocuts are organized into three series, “Berlin,” “Warsaw” and “Auschwitz,” their tales of displacement, Nazi terror and death hauntingly complemented by stark scene drawing.

Ursula M. Kammer, a non-Jew born in Germany, shows compact yet potent assemblages that deal with the human roots of horror in a less direct way than the other artists here.

“Friends” is a small, rough-hewn wooden box with a twisted, rusty scrap of metal, a light bulb and a vintage propaganda button reading “Exterminate these 3 rats: Musi [for Mussolini], Adolf, Togo [Japan’s bellicose leader].”

For her part, Marlene Rubinstein draws on the concrete materials of Jewish faith, including matzo, fabric, wax and even hair to draw a tight linkage between her Orthodox Jewish faith and her art.

The most eerily poignant of her work is “Burnt Offerings,” in which baby food jars have been fitted with images of Holocaust victims’ faces, further pushed into ghostly abstraction by their appearance as photocopied transparencies.

In Jackie Nach’s work, homey family snapshots of Jews before the Holocaust are printed on fabric and subjected to various obscuring strategies.

The end effect is that the former blithe life is effectively smudged out during an especially inhumane wartime.

This art heeds the ideal that remembering a haunting past is integral to its prevention and cure.

BE THERE

“The Legacy of Shoah: Daughters of the Holocaust Seek Meaning in Art,” through May 7 at the Platt Gallery, University of Judaism, 15600 Mulholland Drive, Bel-Air. Gallery hours: Sunday-Thursday 10 a.m.-4 p.m., Friday 10 a.m.-2 p.m. (310) 476-9777.