How David Stern’s ‘Silent Runnings’ Captures the Horror of October 7 – The Forward

“Silent Running” by David Stern in his Westchester studio. Courtesy of David Stern

The colors strike first: a vibrant apricot, a smoky mauve and a black interspersed with thick streaks of purple. These are the colors of the conflagration. But it’s the life-size figures that catch the eye, each emerging from the impasto and seeming desperate to burst from the canvas.

The triptych is part of the figurative artist David Stern’s new series “Silent Running” on October 7. Stern spent five months trying to locate the heart of that early autumn morning, when Hamas terrorists crossed the Israeli border to murder, mutilate and rape 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and take 320 hostage . , some of whom are still detained.

“This work is not a political reaction to the current moment. It was the theme itself that interested me, which goes a little further than the event itself. These are people reduced to their creature status. When they ran, they didn’t think about who they were or what they were doing. It was just about surviving,” Stern said.

Standing in his Westchester studio where dozens of canvases lean against icy white walls and paint splatters on the floor, Stern remembers that he didn’t learn of the terrorist attack until after sunset . It was Simchat Torah and his phone had been off all day.

“The word fell on us. It was immediately clear that this was comparable to the pogroms of Eastern Europe. The main thing here was the collapse of civilization. It’s a shocking moment,” he said.

Backwhose work has been exhibited around the world, including at the September 11 Memorial and Museum and the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest, has not yet exhibited this series.

In another painting, this one part of a diptych, a figure dressed in something scarlet sprints for survival against a deep blue sky.

This work was inspired by a photograph of Vlada Patapov as she fled the Nova music festival. It’s the only photograph Stern looked at from that day because, he says, he doesn’t want to stand in front of the canvas with preconceived ideas about what the day looked or sounded like.

Stern, 68, was born in Essen, Germany, of Jewish parents – one Dutch, the other German – who settled in Germany after the Holocaust. His first memory of artistic experience was his visit to the Folkwang Museumwhich houses a significant collection of 19th and 20th century art, including works by Vincent Van Gogh and expressionist Franz Marc.

Stern’s own style has been described as evoking the artistic legacy of New York School painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. His previous subjects included Israeli soldiers returning home after the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and a “pandemic portrait series” painted while sheltering in place in 2020.

Stern lived and studied in Germany until 1994 when he and his wife decided to exchange Cologne for New York. A year after becoming a naturalized American citizen, al-Qaeda terrorists carried out the September 11 attacks. From there his series “The Gathering” was born.Where was this series? about collective mourning and the reaction of what he described as the “mute and stunned” observers of that day, “Silent Running” is about those who directly experienced a fateful situation.

“It’s about those who have made it through, it’s about how blind violence destroys the individual, their humanity and the very fabric of a civilized society,” he said.

The concept of mortality underlies much of Stern’s work. Indeed, it was something he started thinking about as a child.

“I was eight or nine years old and I was sitting on a window sill on the third floor. Suddenly I realized that I could just fall here or I could just jump and I would be done. And that kind of blew my mind,” Stern said.

Many years later, he would read Ernest Becker’s work THE Denial of deathwhich helped him develop a sort of philosophy of life.

“You can’t live if you don’t accept that you’re going to have to die,” he said. “Not that we will eventually die, but we can die at any time. I could be having a heart attack right now. Boom. There is no stability.

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