Fred Terna

The Consulate General of the Czech Republic in New York and the Czech Center New York, in collaboration with the Václav Havel Library Foundation, present Flame Paintings, a solo exhibition of Fred Terna's "Flame" paintings from the 1980s to more recent works.

The depiction of flames has been a recurring theme in Terna's practice, rendered in deep hues and unexpected texture, achieved through the use of aggregate mixed into paint. These semi-abstract paintings reflect an artist in constant reflection, living with images of the past.

Flame Paintings is curated by the artist's son, Daniel Terna. An artist himself, Daniel has advocated for his father's work since 2016, organizing group and solo shows and contextualizing Fred Terna's practice within a younger generation of contemporaries. Daniel Terna's own work focuses on family and inherited trauma, using his father's experience during and after the Holocaust as a starting point, casting his father as a central figure in his photographic works.

"I grew up alongside my father’s Flame Paintings, which hung on the walls of our home. Instead of photos of smiling family members, we had flames, chimneys, fiery landscapes depicting rows of barracks, with roads leading to the crematorium; figures engulfed in fire, who had flung themselves against the electrified fences. I remember being told by my father that looking up through the small opening on the roof of his barracks, he witnessed flames flickering out of a tall chimney in the night sky. This, he said, is the image that sticks. And hence, these paintings.

But as a child, I didn’t see all that. The paintings, and my father’s story, were just another set of facts in an otherwise pleasant childhood, raised by my father and mother (who is a child of survivors herself). The paintings blurred together, a ribbon of reds and blacks that became yet another texture to our already atypical family of three (I am adopted and Hispanic-Latino). However, seeing the works in this exhibition as a focused group, in pairings and sequences, under different lighting conditions, and removed from the context of our home’s rooms and hallways, is to see these paintings anew, and with a fresh perspective.

Flame Paintings is comprised of 14 paintings, five of which were made in the early 1980s and nine of which were made after 2016. While some Flame Paintings showed up over the years, perhaps during moments of personal disturbance, the majority of them were made during the above two time periods—before I was born (in 1987) and after Trump was elected (in 2016). The most recent work, Morpheme (2022), was made when Putin invaded Ukraine. Also included are two sculptures, cylindrical shapes painted with acrylic, my father’s experiments in “painting in the round” from 1967 (and if you’re comfortable touching the art, they rotate on their metal rods). History is important here, for one of the ways in which my father thinks of his work is akin to the documentary record—that his paintings are primary sources, proof of what he saw. And as any victim of trauma can attest, you have your good days and bad days." - Daniel Terna, 2022