James Cohan is pleased to present Si Lewen, curated by Art Spiegelman, on view at the gallery’s 52 Walker Street location from March 23 through April 27, 2024. Polish-born artist Si Lewen (1918-2016) is best known for The Parade, an epic cycle of sixty-three black and white drawings that contends with the horrors the artist witnessed during the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. Lewen served in the United States Army during the Second World War as part of the Ritchie Boys, a specialized force of native German-speaking G.I.s, some of whom were Jewish refugees who immigrated to the US fleeing Nazi persecution. This strikingly modern and profoundly resonant work is presented at James Cohan alongside important works from Lewen’s oeuvre dating from the early 1950s to the mid-2000s, the majority of which have not been seen for four decades.
This exhibition marks the first time that the full suite of The Parade has been shown in New York, following an exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston in 2023.
