Elisabeth Tonnard

On January 16 my exhibition ‘The Library’ opens at Galerie Block C in Groningen. The opening is at 4 PM and the show will run until February 27.

The Library consists of a series of eight archival pigment ink prints and a small bookwork in an edition of 150 copies.

The images in it are tiny selections from pictures in a catalogue documenting the losses of the Gemäldegalerie at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, the present-day Bode Museum, in Berlin during and after World War II. The Gemäldegalerie lost over four hundred paintings, the sculpture collection at the museum lost about a third of its holdings. Photographic documentation and plaster casts remain as ghostly echoes of what was once there. The majority of losses occurred in the days just before and after the end of the war in May 1945 when two devastating fires in the Friedrichshain flak tower destroyed most of the major works of art that had been stored there for safekeeping. The cause of the fires was never explained and has become the subject of legend. Trapped in there were the paintings these images refer to. Out of the smoke we think up this library of unknown books.

In the exhibition at Galerie Block C there will also be a selection of my artist’s books that appropriate literary works on view, as well as the first trials of a new project titled The Death of the Poet.