Poetry Reading with Ernest Rosenthal at 4pm LAST Projects is pleased to present: This Thin Utopia, a week long show of selections from Ernest Rosenthal's body of drawing, painting, and printmaking between 1943-1989, on the occasion of his 100th Birthday, focusing on the shifting relationship between figuration and abstraction in his work. A solo exhibition is scheduled in May. Interdisciplinary artist Karim Shuquem will be showing prints and paintings in conversation with Ernest Rosenthal. Ernest Rosenthal was born in 1920, into a Jewish family in Vienna. As a teenager he hitchhiked to Paris and saw Picasso's Guernica at the 1937 World's Fair. After Hitler's 1938 annexation of Austria, Ernest was expelled from high school and the family was expelled from the country. The family made a harrowing escape to Belgium and spent a year awaiting US Visas under the immigration quotas. As a refugee, Ernest was informally admitted to art classes, at the Academie des Beaux Arts. The family was allowed entry to the United States in December of 1939. Ernest was drafted into the US Army from 1943 through 1946. He made small watercolors throughout his deployment in Iceland, France and Germany. After his discharge, Rosenthal and his wife, modern dancer Meryl Streitman, moved from New York to California. Meryl and Ernest settled in Laurel Canyon, near Ernest's mentor, Swiss American artist Hans Burkhardt. Meryl and Ernest spent years building the small house and studio that is still Ernest's home. After its completion, Ernest studied painting, lithography, and intaglio printing in Mexico City on the GI Bill. In the early 1960's Ernest was recruited by June Tamarind as a printing fellow at the Tamarind Institute. His lithographic prints for artists such as Ani Albers and Nathan Oliveira are in various museum collections. From the late 1960's through the early 1980's Ernest taught printmaking at Occidental and then Cal State Dominguez Hills. He experimented with process and technique in printmaking throughout this period while creating drawings and paintings traversing figuration and abstraction. Ernest exhibited in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. In the mid 1980's Ernest retired from Cal State Dominguez and his creative practice mainly shifted to his garden, poetry and anti war activism. He published his first book, Not For Drones in 2011 at the age of 91. https://www.facebook.com/ernest.rosenthal.7 Karim Shuquem- Building upon a 27 year history as a stage performer and rock singer, Karim Shuquem creates installations, sculptures, and prints that have relationship with staging, temporality, and process. In the early 2000’s, Shuquem was lauded as the expressive front man of Bay Area punk band The Phantom Limbs while simultaneously getting a degree in graphic design and a BFA from CSU East Bay. After his undergraduate studies Shuquem was the artistic director at Chicago non-profit The Arts of Life and manager of art gallery Reversible Eye. Shuquem has recently completed the Otis College MFA program and works as an art teacher. http://shuquem.com