Hillel Zhenwirth  Art              

This body of work is rooted in my relationship with my father, a Holocaust survivor, and in the unspoken legacy carried across generations. As a second-generation son, I grew up with the shadows of trauma and silence, where love was interwoven with pain, and memory was never far away. These paintings confront that inheritance — the bitterness of what could not be said, and the tenderness of what was still passed on.

The title, “Sour Grapes,” speaks to the lingering aftertaste of history: how wounds we did not choose continue to shape us, and how even my own son now carries fragments of this burden. The images are not only about grief and inheritance, but also about resilience, connection, and the complicated ways that memory lives within a family.