The show is called "Covered Memories - Untold Truths," and the paintings deal, directly or indirectly, with the Holocaust. But the truths, if not the memories, are Finnigan's.

She's a Chicago artist who has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. A New York Times review called her work "immediately appealing" during one of her New York shows, and she has received similar praise from other critics. (The current show is on view through July at the gallery, 207 W. Superior St., Chicago.)

But her life story might be just as intriguing as her painting.

Finnigan was born and raised in Cleveland, the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father.

Her grandfather was a well-known Talmudic scholar, but she never met him nor knew much about him.

"My mother was cut off (from the family) when she married my father, and I never knew my grandparents," she said during a recent phone interview. "My mother didn't talk much about her father, but I remember her saying that after dinner every night she had to be very very quiet because he read from the Talmud at the kitchen table. He and his wife were the wise ones in their shtetl in the Old Country," a village somewhere in Russia, she says.

"My father died when I was 3, and there was a bone of contention about how to bring up my brother and me," she continues. Her mother honored a deathbed request on the part of her father: Bring the children up in the Catholic tradition.

Later her mother, who died two years ago, remarried, to a Jewish man.

"I have a half-sister who is Jewish," Finnigan says. "They made up a little-triangle. My brother and I, we were the double in the house. We lived in a two-family house, and downstairs lived my uncle who read the Hebrew newspaper every morning with his magnifying glass. It was quite eclectic."

Finnigan went to public school and attended catechism class once a week. "I would run home to tell my mother that she better convert really quickly," she recalls. "I ran all the way home from class to tell her that, looking very anxious. I straightened out a little later," she says.

Still, "my brother and I really identified strongly with Catholicism" and their father's heritage, she says. "I went Irish, he went Scotch. My brother plays the bagpipes. We were devoutly Catholic."

For some reason, she became fascinated with the Holocaust early on. "I was writing papers on it in college, even in high school," she says. She even read "Mein Kampf" and other original sources to try to understand how and why events happened as they did, taking buses to city libraries to do research. "I was very interested in that without really understanding why," she says.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that most of her friends were Jewish, including one who had emigrated from Israel. She remembers a seminal moment with that friend.

"She had her cousin over, and he had his sleeves rolled down," she says. "It was a hot day with no air, and I said, isn't he hot? She said, he just doesn't want to show his tattoo. I said, tattoo? I asked to see it, and he reluctantly obliged." The tattoo, of course, was a number from a concentration camp.

"I was in 7th grade - this was an overwhelming moment," Finnigan says.

Eventually, "I became a lapsed Catholic," she says. "This happened over a period of time. It was very difficult, because I so associated (Catholicism) with my father. That was the vestige of him. He was in that whole equation. It gave me great difficulty."

Meanwhile Finnigan, who is now in her mid-50s, was pursuing a career as an artist. (Her first show was at the Skokie Public Library.) She had received her undergraduate degree in art from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and earned a master's in fine arts from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Later she would study with the late, renowned Chicago artist Ed Paschke. Her work, which has been included in many gallery shows and juried exhibitions, includes painting and mixed media.

But there was another odd occurrence that propelled her career in unforeseeable ways. In the '60s, her half-sister was briefly married to Wilhelm Keitel, the nephew (and namesake) of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, known as Hitler's right-hand man. The elder Keitel was tried and hanged at Nuremberg.

During the marriage, which lasted less than a year, "the nephew had a lot to tell" Finnigan's half-sister, "and he took many opportunities to do so," she says. "This changed her. If she ever envied our being Catholic - and she did, she actually went to parochial school for a while - from then on she was completely Jewish."

After talking to her half-sister about the experience, Finnigan began writing an extended poem/monologue, "Dripping Jewels," which she describes as "an in-depth narrative of a Nazi German woman at the close of World War II." It will receive a reading later this year in Chicago in connection with a new show Finnigan will have at the Glimer Gallery in September or October.

The narrative incorporates information she gleaned from her half-sister and her ex-husband. It concerns the fictional German woman's "struggle with her conscience, her duality," Finnigan says. "She agrees to the Holocaust and at the same time lives a fairly ordinary life."

The piece "commemorates Jewish victims of the Holocaust as it explores German female perpetrators, most of whom did not see the inside of a prison after the war though most possessed the same alacrity and zeal in carrying out Hitler's diabolical racist plans as their male counterparts," Finnigan describes the work in a statement.

It also touches on the Catholic church's role in the Holocaust. "I discuss how the church was a thorn in the side of the whole equation, by not intervening," she says. "I make a strong case for that in the work."

At the same time she was making a reputation as a visual artist. Her work ranges from a parody of Andy Warhol - in "Andy's Last Souper" she juxtaposes Warhol's iconic soup can paintings with Da Vinci's "Last Supper" - to mixed media work inspired by suits of armor, unicorns and knights to an exhibition called "The Last of the Muses," asking whether "two World Wars and a Holocaust" could have driven the classical Muses away, then creating a show containing found objects "proving" that the Muses lived.

She has written in an artist's statement: "My paintings are intended to provoke thought and emotion in the Expressionist tradition. I use a variety of media: tempura, oil, acrylic, ink, pastel, pencil and gouache. I often portray a narrative of figures from either the past or the present, and I often reference paintings from artists of past eras. The viewer is thus able to draw a multitude of connections including historic, artistic and personal."

It was such a work that first drew the attention of Chicago gallery owner Josef Glimer, who is Jewish himself. The work "was more or less a graphic drawing of Michelangelo's creation of Adam, but instead of Adam it had Eve, a goddess instead of a god," Finnigan says. On the painting she had superimposed a passage from "Dripping Jewels."

"It was that passage that Josef read first, that first brought me to his attention," she says. Glimer visited Finnigan's studio and was drawn to another work that depicted, among other objects, the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign at the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The painting "is from the point of view of the victims," Finnigan says. "There were five figures in the lower right corner. Josef (Glimer) was quite taken by the work and said he'd like to see the five figures individually painted. He loved what I did and gave me this show. I went on to paint the other (figures) for the show in keeping with the tenor of the show," she says.

For his part Glimer, speaking from Jerusalem, where he has a home, said that what first drew him to Finnigan's work was the "Arbeit Macht Frei" piece.

"I said, how does the name Finnigan work with this piece? What is the connection between Finnigan and Auschwitz?" he says.

When she told him, he was intrigued and asked her to draw the characters she had painted at the entrance to the gate as individuals. She did, and Glimer thought "they were spectacular figures. This is how we started, but it went further than that," he says.

The seminal piece in the show is "Encounter," showing a woman in red in a pose reminiscent of the Edvard Munch's famous "Scream," a comparison Glimer made.

He told Finnigan to "paint for me the moment that you felt that your identity has been rediscovered, and that's what she came up with," he says. "You can put it in the same category of German expressionism as 'The Scream.' These are moments when you are encountering yourself on the bridge, and at that moment all your masks are falling off. It is terrifying but it is also an exhilarating experience."

The artist has the option of crossing the bridge, but, he says, "99 percent of people are so terrified by it that they turn around and walk back. Some jump off the bridge. We're all on it at one point or another. It takes a lot of courage to get stripped to your bones, then pick up the pieces and cross the bridge. She's done it, and lucky me, to be able to help her and expose her, to guide her from my perspective. The result is this exhibition."

Finnigan's works, and particularly "Encounter," contains "the moment the spark lights the creative process. You have to let yourself go, but most people don't," he says. "You have to expose it to the light, the skeletons in the closet, and she's done it.

"Through her art, she was able to rediscover her Jewish context," he says. "She is a true artist."

Emily Booth, the gallery's assistant director, said that "I've been working here for two years, and this show has been the most exhilarating I've seen." She said she "watched the work grow from one piece. Josef (Glimer) was able to draw out all these emotions through her. It seemed almost like she had been too afraid to present them on paper. Watching the show come to life was really a lot of fun."

A description of the show on invitation cards sent for the opening states: "The expressionist work of Sheila Finnigan is honest and uncompromising to its core. As deep as her descent into memories is, so is her steep ascent toward projecting them into images.

"Through painting, drawing, and writing, Sheila hopes that the images she creates 'Lift off the paper through the trembling air to understanding eyes. I strive for ... an image from emotional light. The paint falls away and back again ... almost by my ancestral voices or their hands ... I cannot see in my mind where the paint falls next and why. I allow it to surprise my eyes, perhaps as life itself surprises.'"

Finnigan "did some portraits of Andy Warhol, and they were sort of kitschy," Booth adds. "There is no kitsch in this. There is just emotion and beauty."

As for herself, the show is "not a departure but a continuation," Finnigan says. Work that she painted in the '90s "presented a sort of edgy kind of current New York-y work that Josef (Glimer) thought did not speak about the inner person. What I painted for this show is exactly what I always wanted to say in my work, both in color and content and form.

"I've been an emerging artist and now I've emerged. This is a real emerging," she says.

Questions about whether the paintings depict images from the Holocaust are inevitable, and in answer she says, "They do and they don't. I go to that zone, but it could be the suffering of humanity. Certain paintings seem more influenced than others by the actual Holocaust."

As for her current relationship to her Judaism, Finnigan says only, "I think both rivers run through me, and I swim in that water. I am cognizant of my profound sense of spirituality. That's where my paintings really come from."