Fredrick Einhorn tested HIV+ five years ago. The subsequent manifestations of his illness brought to an end his career as a singer and actor in the musical theater, and turned his creative energies towards the visual arts. The upcoming exhibition will be his first one-person show. It will also be Fredrick Einhorn's retrospective, as the gallery will show all the work he has produced in this much too brief career.
Fredrick Einhorn entitled this exhibition "Carnival of Souls" after the movie by Herk Harvey from 1962. Until his death on May 26, 1993, the artist had worked an adaptation of this film for the musical theater.
The work in this exhibition, though triggered by the artist's struggle with AIDS, is surprisingly unsentimental and humorous in nature. The bronze-cast Barbie Doll, the bronze-cast Fat Albert masks, as well as the drawings which the artist rendered with his own blood, refer back to images which played a key role in the artist's formative teen-age years growing up in suburban Long Island, NY. While these works point to the artist's struggle with his own sexuality and identity, their formal clarity and iconographic qualities serve as vehicles for hope and optimism. Although often struggling with deteriorating health, he was able to produce work that underlined a positive attitude towards the living and more specifically towards his own life.