Although he was born in Berlin, I’ve never thought of Ernst Wilhelm Nay as a particularly German painter. For Nay himself, though, being German was something hard to escape. German artists in the postwar decades had to contend with suspicion, if not antipathy, on the international stage. Considering this, Nay did quite well, although his success was possibly helped by the fact that his later paintings corresponded well with the American Abstract Expressionism of his generation. The exhibition “Nay 1964” offered a closer look into one specific series from Nay’s late work: his so-called “Augenbilder

Until now little known outside Poland, Stanisław Fijałkowski can claim, to say the least, a most distinctive artistic lineage: He was a student of Władysław Strzemiński, who in turn had studied with the modern master Kazimir Malevich. But Fijałkowski is also heir to all the upheaval that his part of the world has suffered over the past century. He was born in 1922 in Poland’s southeast, “a region that was soaked with blood in World War II,” as Anda Rottenberg and Ory Dessau write in the gallery press release; the area is now part of Ukraine. During the war he found himself in a forced-labor camp