Dizzy Achings

Original Acrylic Painting by Henny Kupferstein

Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 36 x 24 in
Year: 2025
Original Work: One of a kind
Artist: Henny Kupferstein

About the Painting

I walked into a Jewish-style deli expecting to feel at home. The menu knew all the right words: matzah ball soup, kishka, chopped liver. The walls were covered with nostalgic photographs and caricatures of another era. Everything was arranged to evoke Jewish memory.

Instead, I felt like I had wandered into a mausoleum. The rituals remained, but the meaning had quietly disappeared. Kosher had become optional. Religious symbols had become décor. Holocaust memory had become aesthetic wallpaper. I sat among familiar objects that no longer recognized me.

The figures in this painting occupy the same room without truly seeing one another. Their faces turn inward, their conversations dissolve into silence, and the table becomes less a place of gathering than a monument to absence. The only object I immediately recognized was a packet of Splenda, a strangely modern relic that became my anchor in a room filled with borrowed memories.

As someone raised in an insular Chassidic community, Jewish food is more than cuisine. It is ritual, identity, family, and history. When those traditions are detached from the values that gave them meaning, they become stage props. Dizzy Achings explores the disorientation of surviving one world only to discover that another has preserved its appearance while forgetting its soul.

It asks what remains after memory becomes merchandise, and whether belonging can exist when only the symbols survive.

Details

• Original acrylic painting on canvas
• 36 x 24 in
• Completed August 30, 2025
• Unique artist catalog number: 083025
• Signed original
• Certificate of authenticity available
• Ships from San Diego, California
• Carefully packaged for shipment

Please contact the artist regarding institutional acquisition, exhibition, local delivery, or special shipping arrangements.

Original artwork — only one available.

The painting is currently permanently mounted in this custom frame and presented as a complete work. For collectors who prefer the painting unframed, the artwork is also available for purchase without the frame.