Bio, TV and Exhibitions
Follow the life of an artist who turned challenges to a quest for the essence of being, constantly sketching, painting, and producing works in various materials. She was an artist, published books, did stage design, produced book covers, worked with TV, taught, and was awarded a series of awards for her artistic output.
Lenke Rothman was born in Kiskunfélegyháza, Hungary, in 1929.
From 1944 to 1945 she was interned in Auschwitz, Guben and Bergen-Belsen, and was taken to Sweden in 1945 by the Red Cross. She spent the years 1945 to 1951 in hospitals in Sweden; attended art school in Stockholm from 1951 to 1955, and the Accademia di Belle Arti, Ravenna, Italy, in 1956 and 1957. She married Sivar Arnér in 1959; a son, Elias, was born in 1966. Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden since 1976. Exhibited art in sveral group shows in Sweden and abroad since 1951, and had her first one-person show in 1960, followed by many more. Large retrospective exhibition at the Swedish Royal Academy of Art, Stockholm, 1976, and later a second one at the Dunker Art Museum, Helsingborg, 2008.
Stage designer for the Stockholm National Theatre production of Strindberg’s Easter, 1981. Program on creativity for Swedish television, 1979, and television program with Andy Warhol in 1981. Represented at the Modern Museum of Art, National Museum and Royal Swedish Library in Stockholm, the University of Uppsala, and in numerous private collections in Sweden, U.S.A., Finland, London and Paris.
Swedish artist in residence in 1981 at P.S.1 in New York, and in 1984 at the Djerassi Foundation, Woodside, California. Author of Quality of Life, 1981, and OK OK NO New York, 1984, both published by Kalejdoskop, Ahus, Sweden.
She died of leukemia in 2008.
TV Interview with Lenke (In Swedish)
TV program with meeting between Lenke and Andy Warhol
Publications by Lenke
LINK TO COLLECTIONS OF ALL BOOKS BY LENKE
Selected examples of publications:
Quality of life: yttringar av liv – tecken – bilder
1980
Type of Publication: Prose with illustrations (in Swedish)
Publisher: Kalejdoskop
ISBN: 91-85552-33-X
1990
1995
2008
2019
Additional Information
Alternative Biography
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Arrival to Sweden, with the boat "Rönnskär".
Documentation on Lenke by the Swedish Red Cross
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Master Thesis on Lenke
by Malin Hedenäs, 2019, on Lenke and her language
Abstract:
In this essay called Searching for Language at the Frontiers of Pain. Lenke Rothman and possibilities and limitations of languages in front of phenomenon of pain, I investigate how experiences of pain and suffering is communicated through four artworks by artist Lenke Rothman (1929-2008). Having survived the Holocaust, she felt, like many other, that testimony of pain and suffering was impossible within the limits of language.
Through a semiotic model for analysis, using Rothmans experiences of both physical and psychological pain as context for interpretation, I discuss how the artworks as visual instead of textual can communicate experience when language fails. With a theoretical starting point in phenomenological theories of pain as something that escapes conceptual definition, I show how the symbolic level in the artworks is able to expand meaning when it comes to the phenomenon of pain. It happens in the gap between words as describing an artworks as showing.
Exhibitions after 2008
Ystads Konstmuseum
Varning för känsliga människor ("Warning for sensitive people")
7 Feb - 3 May, 2015
Sörmlands Museum
Att hopfoga den sönderfallande världen ("Mending a broken world")
24 Nov 2018 - 18 Aug 2019
ArtSpace Södertörn
Den röda tråden ("The Red Thread")
21 Sep – 9 Nov, 2023