| I like humoristic art, so I use this method to express my ideas. Sociology and urban anthropology are useful methods for observing humans in society. But when they try to explain the relation between human and society, logics of common language turn to become useless. This is the one of the main reasons I’ve chosen humor as an artistic language to express ideas. I know that art cannot solve social problems, but I just want to present the problems through art, and I believe this is the real role of art. Even though the power of art is expressed thorough the humor, sociology and urban anthropology cannot replace art and artistic language. | 
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Edward Rubin
Rosalyn Engelman, Boy M, 2008. Installation shot at Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion Museum. Courtesy of the artist.
Rosalyn Engelman’s work was on view at Gallery 440 and the Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion Museum in New York earlier in July.
While Rosalyn Engelman has been making art for what seems like eons, it is only this past summer that the 70-year-old New York-based artist, holding back no punches, decided to show all of her colors at two different venues. What made this outing an amazing feat is that each exhibition differed from the other in the artist’s method, use of materials, and content. If I hadn’t visited the artist’s studio, I never would have believed that such disparate work came from the same hand, not to mention the same mind. But than again, Engelman, who is to be honored with a one-woman show at the National Arts Club this coming January, is no ordinary individual. Twenty years ago the artist was temporary blinded and paralyzed by a rare neurological disorder. Though it took years of fighting to fully reclaim both sight and mobility, mercifully her talent never left her. If anything, the struggle left her, as she likes to say, “a more empathetic and sensitive person, one better able to access her emotions and apply them to my creative pursuits.”
In Dry Tears, a mixed-media installation of painting and sculpture at the Hebrew Union College Museum, Engelman, in a harrowing cri de coeur that left no wound uncovered, indicts all of mankind for its centuries of senseless tortures and killings. Creating what amounts to a small Holocaust museum, the artist peopled the gallery with bloody and mutilated mannequins, lined the walls with paintings of flags awash with tears of sadness from countries like Sudan and Cambodia, whose genocidal wars killed millions, and barbed-wire sculptures that remind one of the fences that surrounded the concentration camps. In Boy M, a painted blue mannequin, with chains on his feet and nails sprouting from every pore—a memorial to the children that Jospeh Mengele experimented on in Auschwitz—we see an innocent child trying to keep his faith in life in the midst of all the horror. Occupying the center stage is the artist’s chilling version of The Three Graces. Here replacing music, poetry, and art with war and devastation, three bloodied woman—our mothers, our children, our neighbors—are bound by chains. Pierced all over, they stand in fouled clothing, on top of bloodied photographic war-torn images, the type the media bombards us with on a daily basis.
Addressing the other side of man’s nature are Engelman’s abstract paintings at Gallery 440 on Lafayette Street. Here, the artist, a colorist supreme and painter of essences, turns our thoughts to peace and calm, love and joy. In this showing, a small selection covering ten years, black, white, and red are the predominant colors of choice. While most of the paintings reference the artist’s experiences, they also trumpet her deep love of poetry, music, and other cultures. In White on White, with beautifully modulated brush strokes, the artist revisits the snowy winters of childhood. In No Libretto, a poetically composed canvas of hundreds a calligraphic brush strokes of ivory, tan, brown, and white hues, we experience Engelman’s love of Chinese art. In Rouge Poem and Beethoven Sixth Symphony, red paintings that remind one of Rothko on a serene and happy day, her use of varying brush strokes and gradation of red tones is simply breathtaking. Most surprising is the artist’s adroit handling of the color black in her various series. Her Japanese Calligraphic series, painted in bold strokes—the type that Franz Kline made his reputation with—confronts us with our own mortality.
