Nov 9, 2023–Feb 18, 2024

Stéphane Mandelbaum

Stéphane Mandelbaum produced hundreds of portraits within a short creative period of just ten years. The first solo exhibition of the artist’s drawings in the United States, Stéphane Mandelbaum will feature more than sixty works on paper and will occupy the entirety of The Drawing Center’s exhibition space. A consummate draftsman, Mandelbaum was devoted to probing the depths of his own persona by conjuring some of the darkest visions of the twentieth-century in Europe. He obsessively documented unnamed figures who populated Brussels’s subcultures, alongside famous figures like Arthur Rimbaud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francis Bacon, and Pierre Goldman as well as National Socialist criminals such as Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Röhm. Mandelbaum sought to capture the essence of their characters with a ballpoint pen, oil paint, or a graphite or colored pencil, often adding scribbles, texts in French, Yiddish–a language that the artist was teaching himself, Italian, or German, or collaged newspaper clippings. His Jewish descent, Belgium’s colonial history, and also the nightlife and underworld of Brussels, permeated his work and ultimately shaped a life driven by the questions: Where do I come from and what can I be?

Stéphane Mandelbaum

Born in Brussels in 1961, Stéphane Mandelbaum (1961–1986) was the son of Jewish Armenian immigrants and artists—the painter Arié Mandelbaum and illustrator Pili Mandelbaum. Nurtured from an early age in drawing, Mandelbaum’s parents enrolled him in an alternative boarding school as a young boy to accommodate his severe dyslexia. Learning to write was difficult, and he soon turned to drawing as a more accessible means of expression, though his drawings frequently incorporate writing riddled with spelling errors, both intentional and unintentional. At sixteen, Mandelbaum began studying at the Academy of Drawing and Decorative Arts of Watermael-Boitsfort, where his drawing increasingly portrayed sexualized and pornographic figures. In 1979, he transferred to the School of Plastic and Visual Arts in Uccle, Belgium, where his father served as Director until 2004. Fascinated with the brilliant and tragic histories of artistic forebearers like Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele, Mandelbaum drew and painted numerous portraits of prominent cultural figures lined with derisive scribbles, names, slogans, and Yiddish graffiti. Deeply influenced by the fate of his paternal grandfather Szulim, a Polish Jew who escaped the Holocaust, Mandelbaum was fascinated by the faces of some of the most notorious Nazis, drawing Josef Goebbels and Ernst Rohm from newsreel photographs and transforming them into more conventionally posed portraits. In 1985, he had his first exhibitions—one at the Galerie Hugo Godderis in Veurne, in northwest Belgium, and another at the Galerie Christine Colmant in Brussels. Around this time, he became infatuated with the aesthetics and lifestyle of Brussels’s underworld, painting images of those seen by society as perverse or immoral. Married to a woman but frequently depicting sexual encounters with men, Mandelbaum’s artworks abound with themes that allude to a contradictory and uncertain identity—one that was constantly in flux and defined by a series of transgressions and untruths. His life was cut short when he was murdered at the age of twenty-five, the result of his obscure involvement with a trafficked artwork. Though he never achieved financial or critical acclaim during his lifetime, Mandelbaum’s body of work was recognized in 2019 in a retrospective organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Stéphane Mandelbaum is organized by Laura Hoptman, The Drawing Center’s Executive Director, in collaboration with Susanne Pfeffer, Director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt where the exhibition debuted in 2022. Following its presentation at The Drawing Center, the exhibition will travel to the Reina Sofia in Madrid.