Article content

A world-renowned Swedish artist has used ashes he took from inside a cremation oven at a former concentration camp in Poland to make a piece of artwork.

In a statement on theMartin Bryder Gallery website in Sweden, where the painting hangs, Carl Michael von Hausswolff explains that he visited the Majdanek concentration camp, now a memorial, near Lubin, Poland, in 1989.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Swedish artist uses ashes from Holocaust concentration camp in painting Back to video

He stole the ashes but didn’t use them in his art until 2010 because they were “too heavily loaded” with the atrocities that took place on the site.

The artist, also a curator and composer, eventually mixed the ashes with water and painted a rectangle on a white piece of paper. The images that emerged represented the “souls” from people tormented and murdered during the Holocaust, von Hausswolff writes.

Whatever his exact intentions, the artist has nonetheless received a barrage of criticism over the inappropriate use of the ashes, and that he stole them in the first place.