Herzl Kashetsky

Herzl Kashetsky LL. D. (born 1950) is a realist painter, known for his commemorative work in paintings dedicated to victims of the Holocaust. The main body of his art has been figurative, and embedded in the representational.

Career Born in 1950 in Saint John, New Brunswick, Kashetsky was inspired to draw and paint as a child, and encouraged by his artist older brother, Joseph (1941–1974). He received his B.F.A. from Concordia University, Montréal, Québec (1972), Beginning in 1992, he created the series Beach Stones, shown at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 1992, which he is still working on to the present day. This series is considered to be some of his most meticulous work.

After a trip in the early 1990s to Poland and visits to holocaust sites, he was inspired to create his elegiac 1996 series, A Prayer for the Dead which was shown in a circulating exhibition by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 1997, curated by Tom Smart, who described it in the catalogue as a visual prayer. A Prayer for the Dead, for which he used documentary photographs as a source, was not only Kashetsky's way of paying respect to the dead, but his way of commemorating the tragedy of the death of six million people in the concentration camps. In 2022, Gallery 78 in Fredericton, New Brunswick held a show titled 50th Anniversary Exhibition – Joseph & Herzl Kashetsky to celebrate the two brothers first professional show at the University of New Brunswick Art Centre in 1972.

Kashetsky is represented in the following public collections, among others: The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle; the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton; the University of New Brunswick Art Centre; the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John; and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Charlottetown.