Barbara Loftus (b. 1946 London, England - Lives Brighton, England)
Painter and filmmaker Barbara Loftus was born to an Anglo-Irish Catholic Communist father and German-Jewish mother in England in 1946. Her mother, Hildegard, who had fled to England in 1939, was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust but revealed nothing of her past until she was in her 80s when her revelations compelled Loftus to undertake an artistic exploration of her family’s past that is still ongoing. She cites a current theory that the second-generation, often the daughter, ‘carries the candle’ for such legacies. Her artworks, centred on the ‘topography of home and location’, are meticulously realised, always rich in period detail, though often muted in palette, and executed on a monumental scale. Her solo exhibitions have been held at numerous locations including the Freud Museum, London (2011), Schöneburg Jugend Museum, Berlin (2013) and Ephraim Palais Stadtmuseum Museum, Berlin (2013-14). Her latest publication is Barbara Loftus: The Distanced Observer (2022), combining testimony, excavation and interpretation, with essays by art historian Dr. Deborah Schultz and Exile Studies specialist Prof. Lutz Winckler.
