INTRODUCTION
The youngest of twelve children born to immigrant Slovak parents, Daniel Hodermarsky (1924-1999) was surrounded by the human figure from his very entrance into the world. As a child his crowded household provided ample subject matter for his first forays into drawing and painting. Indeed, though nature and abstraction would become increasingly important concentrations of his mature work, it was the human figure that would remain the longest sustained subject of Hodermarsky’s great career. As he wrote later in life, “I have concentrated on the human figure because it exists in all time and is, perhaps, the most challenging form to render in drawing and painting.”

A keen observer, Hodermarsky was ever fascinated with the interrelationship of the human body and psyche—with how age, human nature, and personality combine and manifest themselves in the physical form. Throughout his career, Hodermarsky explored this interrelationship incessantly; on his canvases he depicted figures both gorgeous and hideous, defenseless and powerful, good and evil—he portrayed the spiritual, the fantastical, the historical, the mythical.

The selection of paintings here provides what amounts to an abbreviated retrospective of Hodermarsky’s representations of the human figure: there are paintings of Slovak peasants, of soldiers, of the evil perpetrators of the holocaust, mythical and historical figures, vacationers overwhelmed by ennui, and artists viewing paintings in gallery settings. While one might think that it is with this last group that he felt most closely associated, there is, in fact, a piece of Hodermarsky in all of these beings—he is there in that Slovak village, on the Russian gulag, marching in uniform over the snowy Malmedy countryside, and seated on the beach contemplating nature. Indeed, this eclectic assortment mirrors the true complexity of the artist himself.

Through these, his figures, we hope the viewer will glimpse the wide-ranging sensibility, the humor and pathos, of Daniel Hodermarsky’s art, and come to better understand the dimensionality of the artist. Hodermarsky inhabits and speaks to us through each of these, his alter egos—the strong, the weak, the foolish, the brilliant, the melancholy, the bad, the good. In these figures we recognize him, and ourselves.