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Exhibit

Eric Finzi: Return to the Garden

Eric Finzi
July 10 – September 4, 2025

About This Exhibition

In Vittoria de Sica’s 1967 film, Giardino di Finzi Contini (The Garden of the Finzi Continis), the garden becomes a place of refuge where a cultured Jewish Italian family in Ferrara retreats as the racial laws restrict Jews. They play tennis with Italians while believing that their integration into Italian society over six hundred years will protect them. The beauty of their carefree ways ends abruptly when fascism enters their garden. Finzi revisits memories told to him by his father and other members of his ancestral family.

About the Artist

Born and raised in New York City, Eric Finzi has created a singular style with resin that bridges art and science. His work is influenced by time, temperature and gravity, and his tools include syringes, needles, sticks and a blowtorch. Finzi’s vocabulary uses subject matter loaded with cultural and philosophical connotations. He embraces the entropy and chaos of resin to create work that captures a moment in time when the resin has stopped moving. Embracing accidents and failures Finzi turns them into a narrative. The resin seems to encode the passage of time – one feels the painting moving until it is fossilized like an insect in amber. Finzi’s paintings and sculpture have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide since his first show in New York in 2003.
Related Programs

    • Dinner and a Movie at the Museum: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

      Thursday, August 7
      5:30 pm- 8:30 pm

      Join the Maine Jewish Museum and the Maine Jewish Film Festival for a celebration of art, cinema, and the flavors of Italy! From savory pastas to seasonal salads and delectable desserts, your taste buds will be transported from MJM to the heart of Ferrara, Italy. This pasta-tively amazing meal will take place in our Fineburg Community Room, where diners will have the opportunity to view Eric Finzi’s current exhibition Return to the Garden.

      After dinner we’ll gather in the main sanctuary for a screening of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, the poignant and visually stunning film whose themes of love, loss, and the passage of time inspired Finzi’s artwork.

      $36/person

      More Information

Most of the art we exhibit is for sale. Your purchase helps support local artists and the Maine Jewish Museum.