From the very beginning, Peter Weidenbaum has painted portraits as a search for the inner person rather than for outward beauty. Echoing Andrei Tarkovsky, his images carry the tension between life and death, the image becoming a symbol of lived reality.
Many of the portraits are of relatives who have died. While researching his family’s history during the war, Weidenbaum consulted the files of the Belgian aliens’ police, now kept in the State Archives in Brussels. Painting from old, damaged photographs, he gives back an identity to those whose lives were marked or ended by the war. Figures such as Margarete Baron, Alexander Weidenbaum and Joseph Weidenbaum embody this history, while the story of relatives who fled Nazi persecution reflects a wider theme of displacement that resonates with the experience of refugees today.
The biographical runs through his whole oeuvre. Portraits of his children recur, reflecting his attention to what surrounds him, in a tradition of realism that runs from Gustave Courbet to Pierre Bonnard, Gustave Caillebotte and, more recently, David Hockney.
