Critiques
Thomas Messer, director of the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1983
Rosemarie Koczÿ, who first came to our attention as an imaginative
and skillful weaver of tapestries, has subsequently developed into a
painter of scope and authority. The phase of her exacting, deliberate,
slow-process craftsmanship seems to have prepared and eventually
released her for the practice of an uninhibited artistry. This began with
freely scribbled drawings that, while yielding to a new gestural
spontaneity, nevertheless remained carefully structured. Feeling her
way into the paper medium, Koczÿ then opens up with an India ink
barrage in which her painterly instincts are no longer restrained as
brush replaces pen and as a new felt kinetic sense determines both form
and subject matter of her production. Koczÿ’s work in black and white
thus carried the germs of color within itself and remained a safe guide
and reference as she moved on to acrylic and canvas.
Having worked assiduously and often in relative isolation, Koczÿ, like
others in similar position discovered, not without some astonishment,
that she was not alone and that the images, so private and personal to
her, nevertheless form part of an awareness that many artists of her
generation share.
Her subject matter, which places man, woman, child and beast in an
environment pared down to basics, cannot be viewed without
contradicting sentiments, for who could fail to find in such post-industrial
visions a menacing as well as an ultimately consoling content? As in all
authentic creative expressions, however, Koczÿ’s art, in the last analysis,
speaks to us through formal authority and through convincing resolution,
leaving us thereby in a state of catharsis, uplifted and hopeful.
Michel Thévoz, director of the
Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
1988
(translated by Louis Pelosi)
To silhouette a figure, inscribe it on a surface: an elementary graphic
operation, resolved already three thousand years, and within the reach of
any three-year-old. Now from this evident fact, Rosemarie Koczÿ has made
a problem. For ten years she has worked relentlessly to install a figure in a
paper or canvas rectangle; and the stability of this figure has become
increasingly problematic. Why? Because Rosemarie Koczÿ associates this
difficulty with that of her own insertion into existence. Moreover, and as a
result of the resonance between her drawing and her subjectivity proper, the
existential problem expands into a universal drama.
“Far, far from you, unfolds the world history, the world-wide history of your
soul,” said Kafka. Such is the paradox of artistic creation: expression of the
spirit of the time occurs by virtue of the most intimate introspection. It is
through extreme singularity that an artist attains universality. One senses
intensely that within the lines of the drawings of Rosemarie Koczÿ passes a
supercharged current which connects her existential anguish to an
indefinitely expanding network in space and time …
The more she advances in her dramaturgy of existence, the more the space
of the sheet of paper is charged with an energy which threatens to overturn
the rapport between figure and ground and to annihilate even the idea of
identity. The central figure loses the ontological privilege it held throughout
a thousand-year humanistic tradition; it is but an absence, an abyss, a stitch
threading through the tissue of existence, a breach in the wall of appearances,
an auto-consumption of space, the black hole of the astrophysicists, the
fantastic implosion of matter that destroys itself because of the very excess of
its own mass — in short, the metaphors swallow themselves up in this
catastrophic void, quite incapable of doing justice to the subtle and infinite
variations which, from drawing to drawing, and without breaking the thread,
resume and develop a unique theme.
So long as we allow ourselves to be drawn along, we will sense that, beneath
this obsessive uniqueness, each drawing has its tessitura, tonality, modulation
and rhythm proper to itself — ultimately, it is the musical metaphor that
captures it. “It is not the gods who created music, it is music which created the
gods,” said André Malraux. What then stands out from the graphic symphonies
of Rosemarie Koczÿ is the empty place left by the gods, that is to say a
redoubtable sacredness, fundamentally and tragically god-bereft.
Fred Licht, curator of the
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
1988
Darkness is one of the great themes in art as in literature of our times. Our
darkness, unlike the darkness, say of Rembrandt’s paintings, is an absolute
darkness. A darkness that is autonomous. For millennia, darkness, when it has
been a theme in art, existed as a function of illumination. Darkness gave light
its ultimate sacred meaning. Darkness was only the starting point of the human
condition from which it is redeemed by light.
Rosemarie Koczÿ is one of the few artists who has experienced the demands of
the epoch’s darkness, and who responds to the demand by making manifest in a
great wealth of drawings, the power of darkness, its triumph over all those areas
which once were consoled by light. In that, as in so many other aspects of her
work, she is totally (one would say brutally if it were not for the anguish that
accompanies each one of her drawings) uncompromising. Like Mr. Kurtz of
Joseph Conrad’s epic tale of human perdition, she has seen “the horror of it”:
and she is impelled by every fiber of her existence to send us warning signals
of what she has experienced. She seems never to have asked herself whether
these signals will be received and understood or not. She has no choice in the
matter. The power which enables her to transmute her recognition of darkness
into drawings, compels her to do its bidding. One hesitates to speak of her
“talent.” Talent implies something that is nurtured by any number of faculties,
by practice, by style. Talent is a consolatory gift. Goethe’s Torquato Tasso
recognizes at the moment of his deepest pain and humiliation that he is saved
by his God-given talent to communicate to others all that he has suffered. One
does not sense this kind of an artist’s prideful confidence when looking at the
drawings by Rosemarie Koczÿ …
Koczÿ’s drawings have a moral aspect … Part of this ethical bias resides in the
sense one has of her executing these drawings, as I have mentioned earlier, as
a warning signal … In other words, one receives the impression that she feels it
her duty to execute her drawings and duty cannot exist without a sense of
moral responsibility.
There is another level of Koczÿ’s moral impulse. Her images of fear and anguish
hint at there being a source of darkness and of evil. The origins of this evil are
forever inscrutable but the incarnation of evil tends to be of human semblance.
The fearful pain that is so often Koczÿ’s subject is perceived by her to be
transmuted by human creatures. There is always a tremor of panic in her work,
a panic induced by the knowledge that under the impact of terror, we the victims
might in turn hit out and become blind tools of darkness. Even in darkness,
Koczÿ keeps her eyes wide open.
These impressions cannot be “proved” to be correct. Nor certainly can they be
adequately defined by the poor critical vocabulary that has been forged in our
century for the enigmatic quality of so much of our art. Perhaps my reaction to
her drawings as being impelled by a need to speak to others as well as to herself,
perhaps this reaction is false … Perhaps, also it doesn’t matter at all whether we
ever arrive at a point of being able to express the quintessential, unrepeatable
impact of her images. What does matter is to follow her call to contemplate the
darkness which she shares with us and which she, unlike us, neither tries to
evade or deny.
Hans-Jürgen Schwalm,
director of the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen
2017
Rosemarie Koczÿ’s paintings, drawings and reliefs are profoundly human,
compassionate … Her work is an artistically convincing statement on the
darkest chapters of recent human history and the great tragedies of the twentieth
century, among which the Holocaust is unprecedented …
She translated her knowledge of weaving technique and also the variety of her
textile art into the drawing. This is how the thread becomes line and dominates
the graphic expression of almost all her works on paper. Whether as a powerfully
concentrated turbulence or a nervous filigree stroke, whether as a light texture or
dense network of the image ground, just as the thread in the square of the loom
the movement of each drawing is always braced in the coordinates of the image
field and, thus rhythmically disciplined, expresses a precise pictorial consciousness.
Comparable to textile work — be it sewing, weaving or spinning — we may also
speak of the medium of drawing as something elementary, almost archaic, and see
in it a constituent of human existence from the beginning. Even today it is regarded
as the most immediate release of an idea, as the most spontaneous expression of
artistic subjectivity and imagination … Drawing is always a sign too, and Rosemarie
Koczÿ has taken up and symbolically compressed this very aspect of the medium
with unremitting consistency …
She works within a narrow figurative canon, but also with an inexhaustible
repertoire of graphic signs that never degenerate into sentimentality, but through
empathy and compassion merge the conscious and unconscious, the subjective
feeling and the collectively inherited history. In essence her drawings and
paintings refuse anecdotal interpretation and, if you will, transform into an
abstract narrative. The figure, hovering on the ground of the picture, creates a
kind of immaterial aura refusing any real location. The surface transcends and
reveals that something that Jean-Paul Sartre once called “world-transcendence.”
Just as the line in Koczÿ’s drawings marks the narrow ridge between form and
shape, the drawn figures move … on the border between being and nonbeing,
life and death. The closeness of death is tangible in every drawing, even if it is
not portrayed and nobody dies … When the line almost disappears … it is no
longer an enclosing limiting contour, but vacillates between designation and
deletion, being and decay, so — to put it again — between life and death. In the
transparency and immaterial volatility of the lineament, which seems to be
absorbed again and again by the soft ground of the drawing paper, the slow
extinction of the depicted figures is reflected, a visualization as a mere
phenomenon and only a shadow of itself.
Death gets a face with every drawn figure — usually one or two and rarely a
group — and suddenly seems familiar. Death in the drawings of Rosemarie
Koczÿ is silent; in its silence the figures appear as if they were transfixed … The
bodies, sometimes huddled or spindly stretched, then twisted around themselves
and wildly dislocated, are transformed into pictorial signs, which with eloquent
expression and great formal precision stand against the anonymous, nameless
dying in the Shoah. Between black and white, polar opposites … and yet related
to each other, life oscillates back and forth in an eternal cycle. The worldviews
of human thought have always been inscribed in black and white, the notions of
good and evil, heaven and hell, death and dying. Rosemarie Koczÿ uses a lot of
black and only a little white to take an artistic stand and to color her view of the
world.