Kitchen Cupboard

Herzl Kashetsky (b. 1950)

Herzl Kashetsky is a New Brunswick painter initially associated with the magic realist school, a regional art movement centred in Atlantic Canada. These artists combined highly realist paintings of objects with an almost surrealist intensity of light, which is evident in Kashetsky’s meticulously executed 1992 series Beach Stones. In 1996, Kashetsky completed “A Prayer for the Dead,” a series of paintings depicting the Holocaust, for which he received the Canadian Red Cross Humanitarian Award. These paintings were noted for their haunting tone and detailed recreation of the faces of the dying, a mass grave and crematorium door, said to be the artists’ way of “paying respect to the dead, to the victims of the Holocaust” as well as those lost from his own life. Curator Tom Smart of Fredericton’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery said of these works, "As I came to know Herzl and his work as an artist, I learned that his lifelong project is to bear witness to the large themes of humanity in deeply meditative works."

Kashetsky has received numerous awards throughout his career. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of New Brunswick in 1992 and a commemorative medal for outstanding artistic contribution to the community for Canada's 125th anniversary of Confederation. In 2011, he was awarded the Strathbutler Award from the Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation, which has called his work, “a deep and honest exploration of the human condition.” In 2012, he received the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.