Gershon Iskowitz

Gershon Iskowitz RCA (November 24, 1919 – January 26, 1988)^[1] was a Canadian artist of Jewish background originally from Poland. Iskowitz was a Holocaust survivor of the Kielce Ghetto, who was liberated at Buchenwald. The circumstances of his early life—the trauma of the Holocaust and the uncertainty of the immediate postwar period, followed by immigration and adaptation to Canada—provide a lens through which to understand and appreciate his work.^[2] His early figurative images represent his tragic observed and remembered experiences while his later luminous abstract works represent his own unique vision of the world.^[2] Iskowitz's work does not easily fit into contemporary schools and movements, but it has been characterized as hard-edge, minimalist, abstract expressionist, and action painting.^[3]