Maryan

Maryan, born Pinchas Burste in Poland, was a Holocaust survivor whose art confronted violence, trauma, and absurdity with raw, unflinching power. Deported as a child and severely wounded in a concentration camp, he later rebuilt his life as an artist in Paris before eventually moving to New York.

Maryan’s work is instantly recognizable: grotesque figures, deformed faces, and harsh lines charged with both humor and horror. His paintings resist neat categorization part expressionist, part comic, part scream. He turned suffering into a visual language at once deeply personal and brutally universal. He called his protagonists « Personnages », but they were more than characters: they were masks of survival, mirrors of cruelty, and caricatures of humanity itself. Maryan’s art did not decorate—it accused, laughed, and shouted. Today, he is often compared to Philip Guston, influencer of Jean-Michel Basquiat and as a fierce, uncompromising voice of postwar art, whose work remains urgent in its refusal to forget. Survivor. Witness. Jester. Accuser. Maryan was all of these at once.