Maryan was born Pinchas Burstein in Nowy Sącz, Poland, in 1927. His early life was defined by catastrophic loss — he survived Auschwitz and several other concentration camps, losing his entire family in the Holocaust, and was liberated in 1945 having endured experiences that would mark every aspect of his subsequent art. After the war he made his way to Israel, then to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, before settling permanently in New York in 1962.
Maryan’s work is raw, urgent, and deliberately uncomfortable. His figures — grotesque, clownish, and deeply human — emerge from a visual language shaped equally by his traumatic history and his dark, sardonic humour. He painted and drew obsessively, producing images of masked figures, performers, and outcasts that oscillate between the tragic and the absurd. His art refuses the consolations of beauty or resolution, insisting instead on bearing witness to suffering while refusing to be defeated by it. He signed his work with a single name — Maryan — as both an act of artistic identity and a quiet reclamation of selfhood.
His prints Untitled and Dog, produced in collaboration with Fred Genis, carry the same restless, searching energy as his paintings — figures and forms that seem to push against the boundaries of the page with barely contained force.
Maryan died in New York in 1977 at the age of forty-nine, leaving behind a body of work that is only now receiving the sustained international attention it has always deserved.
