And This Is How It Ended? 

(The Divorce Show) 

zara KRIEGSTEIN

(click on image to enlarge)

Biography  

Zara Kriegstein was born in West Berlin, Germany in 1952. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting 

from the Academy of Art in West Berlin where she studied from 1972 to 1978. Upon graduation, Kriegstein spent 

one year travelling through Italy, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Malaysia and Mexico to study the art and 

culture of these ancient civilizations. It was during her travels that Kriegstein determined to dedicate her work to 

the social and political issues throughout the history of mankind. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1980.

Kriegstein's painting combines the styles of two cultures-- German Expressionism from the 1920s and 1930s and 

Mexican mural painting, especially the works of Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. Both styles took as their 

core an impassioned commitment to improving social conditions in cultures that could be said to have gone mad. 

The artists of Die Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity), Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, produced 

cynical, angry art that laid naked the poisoned society of Germany between the wars. Today, still, Kriegstein's acidic 

morality plays find contemporary society no less a target in need of humane transformation.