Purpose:

On this site, the attempt has been made by the site administrator to present much material which is not to be found on the two previous sites of Tamara. There has been some overlap in order to preserve the continuity of materials and periods. The major theme running throughout the site and the art is the Holocaust. Through this experience is the hope that such an event will never happen again.
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Below is a review by Bella Shomer Zeichik, the curator of the exhibition of Tamara's paintings at the the new museum at Yad Mordichai.

KADDISH
Tamara Deuel

The museum "From Shoah to Establishment of the
State of Israel" at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai opened a
new exhibition of the painter Tamara Deuel.
In the series "Kaddish" done in mixed media, the
artist raises the spirits of those who died in the
Shoah.

Her works hang in the gallery on the second floor of
the museum and are seen as a series of visions and
depictions derived from other worlds and spheres.
The wail of Tamara is a singular voice flowing from
the soul and deals with a spiritual expression of art
which is almost religious. The paintings and
the pieces of biography are the journey from death
and remnants of the loss of life to belief and healing.
Her creation penetrates the heart and expresses a
testament and a ritual of endless prayer.

"I swear that to the last day of my life I will not
forget nor forgive in remembrance of the multitude and
the precious two who on the day that I was born, gave
me life."
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Links to Other Sites of Tamara Deuel
tamaradeuel.com - In Remembrance
etherealjourney.com - Tamara Deuel with Bernard Banville
remember.org - Major Holocaust remembrance site - portal to Tamara's site
List of Museums and Exhibitions
[*]Yad VaShem, Israel 3 paintings Donated
[*]Yad Haad Museum for the Holocaust Moshav Nir Galim
[*]Museum Tel Yithak, Israel 7 works donated
[*]Achva College in the Negev, Israel 1 donated
[*]Holocaust Museum Washington DC., U.S. various photographs
[*]Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial.Museum, Poland 3 paintings donated
[*]From Shoah to Establishment of the State of Israel Museum, Kibbutz Yad Mordechai - Exhibition
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Review Upon First Viewing Tamara's Work

"Abyss of the Dispossessed"

I am greatly moved by the work of Tamara Deuel. I
visit each tableau with a sense of wonderment,
noticing with subsequent viewings very subtle changes
in content. Hidden images emerge, eliciting from the
minds eye new interpretations of dreamlike amorphous
shapes. Forms dissolve and become new forms. Bodies
interlace with bodies, appearing and disappearing like
ghosts in foggy whisps of despair entwined with
occasional flourishes of hope. Faces emerge, some gray
and almost lifeless, corpselike masks of anguish.
Others materialize seeming more filled with life
energy, wraithlike forms punctuated with occasional
innocent smiles from a lost childhood. Light and
darkness grapple with each other, and strong colors
accentuate the foreboding atmospheres which permeate
the paintings.

Unlike much other art of the holocaust, which,
although powerful, tends more toward literal
representation of life conditions in the death camps,
Tamara Deuel's work contains imagery filled with
metaphor and metonym, poetically rendering horrors
witnessed and experienced. It documents the memory of
brutal journeys and severe hardships endured. In the
poetical expression of its vision is found a
disturbing beauty and transformational essence. It is
work made, not by attempting to create a
representational likeness of the external world, but
by engaging the imaginative apparatus and powers of an
intuitive inner mind, and bringing forth original
images from the labyrinth of emptiness...it is an
oeuvre which navigates the dark and endless corridors
of the abyss and ignites the inner flame of conscious
awareness.

The works are crowded with the melancholic perfume of
death...the virulent scent of living too closely
together under unimaginably harsh conditions of
oppression. They are also overwhelmingly endowed with
the light of transcendence...the illumination of souls
traversing shadow lands of oblivion and emerging
beyond all hope of survival to experience one more day
of life...evoking as well, the stark reality of trying
to preserve existence when the only sustenance is from
steaming kettles of bland lifeless broth, gray liquid
devoid of nutrition...barely enough for physical
survival.

The images are overwhelming in their portrayal of a
humanity dispossessed of its due right to
existence...of beings erased from the continuum of the
living. There is as well, a sense of solitary survival
in figures surrounded by displaced foregrounds and
shifting firmament of a hell beyond all
description...an unreality, a psychosis of existential
fragmentation so extreme as to render the likelihood
of survival impossible...unthinkable...a delusional
dream...yet in all this, there is a tender rendering
of hope for the coming of dawn, of a new day, of a
change in the dank ruthless climate, of reprieve from
the relentless darkness ceaselessly hovering on the
edges of awareness.

Tamara Deuel's art remembers the past, and does not
allow us to forget...forged by treacherous
deportations across landscapes of suffering and death,
it exists nonetheless as the most gracious gift
possible from an artist who has navigated the worst
nightmares this misguided world has ever brought into
existence. In gazing upon this rich and vibrant work,
one contemplates the miracle of human capacity for
endurance.

Ben Banville 2005