Untitled

1985

Hannelore Baron’s intimately scaled and collaged works on paper contain personal alphabets, evocative fabric scraps, and unsettled abstract forms that point to themes of suffering and hope. At age 12, Baron witnessed Nazis destroy her home and beat her father during the 1938 Kristallnacht attack against Jewish communities across Germany. These traumatic memories informed her hermetic practice decades later—seen in red splotches of paint, graphic suggestions of barbed wire, and fabric allusions to flags and nationalism—which she developed primarily at the kitchen table in her family’s Bronx home. Living with depression, anxiety, and later cancer, Baron saw her work as a protest against war and injustice on a global scale.