German-born draughtswoman, painter and tapestry weaver, naturalised American, born on 5 March 1939 in Recklinghausen (Germany), died on 12 December 2007 in Croton-on-Hudson (New York).
Life
According to the account she herself gave of her life, Rosemarie Koczÿ, of Jewish descent, was deported in 1942, at the age of three, with her family, and survived the camps of Traunstein and Ottenhausen; freed in 1945, she was raised by her grandparents, then placed in an orphanage. In November 2017, on the occasion of an exhibition of her works in Recklinghausen, local historians and archivists concluded from the city archives that this account had been invented: neither she nor her parents were Jewish or persecuted, and she was never interned. Her husband contested these conclusions.
In 1959 she left Germany for Geneva. Admitted in 1961 to the École des arts décoratifs, she graduated with distinction in 1965. She devoted herself at first to tapestry, carried out ethnological research into the textile techniques of Africa and Oceania, and made more than seventy textile works in fifteen years, shown in two Geneva museums in 1970 and 1979. In 1984 she married the composer Louis Pelosi, whom she had met at the MacDowell Colony, and moved to the United States; she became an American citizen in 1989.
The work
From the 1970s her work was devoted to the memory of the Holocaust. She then began a sequence of Indian ink drawings entitled I Weave You a Shroud (Je vous tisse un linceul), dedicated to the victims: drawing on the Jewish funeral rite of washing the body and burial in a shroud, she outlined silhouettes of naked bodies with fine lines. She left more than 12,000 pen-and-ink drawings, as well as paintings and sculptures. Her memoirs were published in three volumes, I Weave You a Shroud (2009-2013).
Exhibitions and collections
- 1985: she inaugurated the Neuve Invention annexe of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
- 1986: first woman to receive the Francis J. Greenburger Award, presented at the Guggenheim by Thomas Messer
- 2007: Yad Vashem received her largest sculpture, Deportation of the Children
- Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne (Je vous tisse un linceul, 1988)