August 27 – November 19, 2017

From August 27 to November 19, 2017 the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen is showing more than 100 works by Recklinghausen-born artist Rosemarie Inge Koczÿ. The exhibition centres on ink drawings from the cycle ‘I weave you a shroud’, with which the artist commemorates the victims of the Shoah, as well as paintings and sculptures, all of which have been generously donated to the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen's collection as part of the artist's legacy.

Rosemarie Koczÿ was born in Recklinghausen on March 5, 1939. She spent her childhood and youth with her grandparents in Recklinghausen-Hochlarmark and in a Catholic orphanage near Münster. In 1959, she moved to Switzerland and two years later successfully applied to the École des Arts Décorafis in Geneva. After completing her studies, she mainly designed tapestries and produced more than seventy wall hangings, some of them large-format, initially woven in the classic flat style, later with a material-like raised and sculptural design. In 1972, she met Peggy Guggenheim, who commissioned a tapestry for her Venetian Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, now the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, but above all introduced her to her later mentor Thomas Messer, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Both encouraged Rosemarie Koczÿ to move to New York in order to further develop her work in what was then the ‘hotspot’ of the art scene.

At the beginning of the 1970s, her artistic work initially focussed on trouble spots and war zones around the world and finally on the Holocaust. By the time of her death, she had created more than 12,000 ink drawings commemorating the victims of the Shoah, always with the same text on the reverse: ‘I weave you a shroud.’ In this way, she pays tribute to the dead: ‘The shroud is the line fabric that surrounds each of my figures in order to bury them with dignity.’ The gestural intensity of many drawings contrasts with sheets of almost immaterial fleetingness and transparency of line: A ‘silken thread’ on which life hangs and yet strong enough to give hope.In 1984, she married the American composer Louis Pelosi, whom she met as a scholarship holder at the MacDowell artists' colony, and moved with him to Croton-on-Hudson near New York in the same year. Here they both regularly organised art and music events, but above all supported young artists. When Rosemarie Koczÿ died in December 2007, she left behind an extensive and haunting oeuvre that convincingly illustrates the possibilities of visual art in the ‘face of the Shoah’.

Koczÿ's works have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, the USA, Japan and Israel. They are represented in the collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and in the Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne, among others. The Buchenwald and Yad Vashem memorials in Jerusalem also own works by the artist.

As part of the exhibition, Rosemarie Koczÿ was to be included in the online memorial book that the city of Recklinghausen maintains in memory of the victims and persecutees of National Socialism. As there were no entries about the families of Rosemarie's parents Karl Koczÿ and Martha Wüsthoff in the relevant lists and registers, extensive research began, involving not only the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen but also Dr Matthias Kordes, Head of the City and Vestische Archive, and Georg Möllers, First Alderman of the City of Recklinghausen and historian responsible for the online memorial book.

The results of the research can now be read in an 80-page publication. It is now available from the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen and the city archives for 3 euros.

Bibliography:
Marion M. Callis, Rosemarie Koczÿ, Art As Witness, L’Art Comme Témoignage, QCC Art Gallery, The City University of New York, Bayside, New York 2013
Rosemarie Koczÿ, I Weave You a Shroud, Hrsg.: QCC Art Gallery Press, The City University of New York, Bayside, New York 2009