102-year-old Vienna-born, Los Angeles artist Ernest Rosenthal is opening his solo show and retrospective with LAST Projects Gallery at Tin Flats with 250 works from 1940 thru 2017 curated by the artist. Ernest is a Vienna-born Holocaust refuge, WWII vet, painter, master printmaker, poet, teacher, peace activist, and long-time Laurel Canyon resident who studied with David Sisqueiros in Mexico and showed with such seminal LA artists as John Altoon in the1960's. We are thrilled to collaborate with Ernest and host this long overdue exhibition of an incredibly talented, vital, and prolific living artist, with selections from his 80-year archive. Ernest Rosenthal was born in Vienna, Austria in 1920 into a middle-class Jewish family and started drawing and painting as a child. As a teenager, he hitchhiked to Paris and saw Picasso's Guernica at the 1936 World's Fair which was a foundational experience. In 1938 the Nazis occupied Austria and Ernest was expelled from high school along with the other Jewish students. After being summoned to meet the Gestapo, the family made a narrow escape to Brussels, Belgium. Ernest studied portrait sculpture at the art academy of Brussels for six months before the family was given refugee status in the United States. Ernest has been a meticulous archivist of his own work and kept a photo album with documentation of his 1930's sculptures but his physical archive starts in 1940 when the family arrived in New York. The pastel and Conte portrait drawings on view in this retrospective are from Ernest's New York period in 1941-1943. Ernest was drafted into the army in 1943 and spent the bulk of the war on a US base in Iceland where he experimented with watercolor landscapes. In the immediate postwar period of 1945 thru 1946 he was stationed in France where continued to draw and paint portraits while working as a French and German translator for the US Army. . After his army service, Ernest met and married pioneering modern dancer, choreographer, and teacher Meryl Stritman, who danced with Martha Graham and Charles Weidman. They met when she worked as an art model for life drawing classes held at Ernest's sister's house in Long Island. Selected portraits of Meryl rendered in painting, sculpture, and drawing throughout a period of 70 years are on view at the gallery. The couple moved to Los Angeles and settled in Laurel Canyon where they bought land and built their house themselves in the late 1940s. Ernest was a protege of Swiss American Abstract Expressionist artist Hans Burkhardt and was inspired by Burkhardt's self-built house nearby in Laurel Canyon. In the early 1950's Ernest studied painting and printmaking at La Esmerelda National School in Mexico City on the GI Bill and his large-scale abstract expressionist oil paintings from that period are featured in the exhibition as well as some etchings. David Alfaro Siqueiros was one of his teachers and it was at La Esmerelda that Ernest developed his printmaking craft. Upon his return to Los Angeles in 1960 Ernest was recruited by June Wayne to become a printmaker at Tamarind where he made lithographs for Ani Albers, Rufino Tamayo, and Lee Mullican among other artists, that are in museum collections worldwide. Ernest also exhibited with John Altoon and other seminal Los Angeles artists of the 1950s and 1960s. Ernest worked prolifically n the 1960's and 1970's and produced his central body of figurative drawings, abstract drawings, paintings, and prints. Ernest was recruited from Tamarind to start the print-making program at Occidental in the mid-1960s and began an academic career at Occidental, CSUN, and Cal State Dominguez Hills that lasted until his retirement in the1980's. His expansive terraced garden, with its hundreds of cement-filled hubcap steps, sculptures, and found objects assemblages in Laurel Canyon was the site of many art happenings and was a gathering place for his students and cohorts from the Canyon. From the mid-1980s until very recently it was the locus point of his creative practice, along with his polemical poetry and committed social justice and peace activism. Ernest designed and curated his own retrospective and we are very proud to host this important and overdue solo exhibition. He has selected 250 works from his archive for this exhibition. His book of poetry Not For Drones, published in 2012 will be available at the gallery.