Dessa (artist)

Deborah Petroz-Abeles (born Deborah Sharon Abeles on 20 December 1948 in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe), known professionally as Dessa, is a Swiss artist.

Early life

Dessa was born into a Jewish family in Southern Rhodesia, the daughter of a Polish mother and a Hungarian father, who completed his medical training in Italy. Her father established the first private medical practice in Bulawayo for Black Africans. As a young child, Dessa had instruction in ballet and piano, the latter playing a central role in her art. After matriculating she lived in Israel from 1965 to 1976, where she studied occupational therapy. In 1977 she moved to Paris and then to Switzerland in 1981, becoming a Swiss citizen in 1983.

Career

Dessa grew up in a society determined by racial divisions. This experience is reflected in her art, which synthesizes associations and transcend borders. Her creative output reflects her cultural diversity, both in the choice of her subjects (through which she explores her identity), and the mediums and means of expression she utilizes. In her early period she explores the relationship between visual art and music. Many works from this period arose from mediations on specific works, complimented by musicological research, resulting in paintings in which the music guides her artistic expression. Composers whose music has inspired visual responses include Béla Bartók, Leonard Bernstein, Ernst Bloch, Benjamin Britten, Unsuk Chin, Detlev Glanert, Dominique Gesseney-Rappo, Erich Korngold, Gustav Mahler, Olivier Messiaen, René Oberson, and Nino Rota. The scope of her work has expanded since 2000, as her works take on a profound historical dimension, integrating copious research as well as rare archival materials.

Visual works in dialogue with music

Dessa characteristically devotes herself to a particular theme for quite some time. This approach goes with empirical experience and spiritual discoveries which together become a kind of initiation and allow the artist to explore her subject with particular intensity. Triggered by spontaneous interest, the exploration process widens into an unending passion that challenges the artist's own energy.

Dessa's art works are, in fact, dialogues expressed as paintings. They are dialogues that often resemble spiritual excercises. Because – if they are not in direct communication with a musician like today's improvisation – they require a lot of solitude, concentration and sacfrifice. With interlocutors such as Mahler, Schreker, Ullmann or Britten one simply cannot discuss. One has to love them, know them well, their ideas, their destiny, their tragedy. Without this, they do not open up to us.[1]

The scope of her musical collaborators has enlarged to include living composers (Unsuk Chin und Detlev Glanert[2]). Additionally she has collaborated on several "live-painting" concerts, e.g. Flying Colours and Musiques et Pinceaux, 2008.[3]

The music of Viktor Ullmann, specifically the last Piano Sonata No 7, brought to life the loss of her grandparents in Auschwitz concentration camp. Ullmann, who had been deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, composed his final works there, before he was deported to the camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered on 18 October 1944. Her 1997 project "Ein Vermächtnis aus Theresienstadt" (A Legacy from Theresienstadt) was exhibited both in the Berliner Dom in 2000 as well as in Theresienstadt in 2002.

The music gives rhythm to the gesture and allows the color to unfold... Dessa seizes the canvas, sets in motion powerful waves that burst into foam with their disheveled splatters, ground-swells that tear the surface of their irresistible force... Her instinctive fervor and impetuous passion are the temperament of a true painter.[4]

Visual works in response to the Shoah

An accidental discovery in an antique store in Berlin in November 2000 of a unique album entitled Die Hygiene im Wandel der Zeiten (Hygiene Throughout the Ages) developed into her most ambitious project to date, a plethora of research resulting in a book as well as a new series of paintings as a tribute to the Kaufhaus Nathan Israel (Israel's Department Store), which existed from 1815 to 1939. The Kaufhaus N. Israel was not only for a time the largest department store in Berlin but also one of the largest retail establishments in Europe, employing over 2,000 people. The album that Dessa found was one in a series of fifteen annual publications that the Kaufhaus N. Israel published between 1900 and 1914.[5]

Dessa created a series of paintings entitled "Stolzesteine", both as a tribute to N. Israel and as a reaction to the Stolperstein which she encountered in Berlin. In her view, the Stolperstein are an particularly problematical method of commemorating murdered Jews, nonetheleast because they are trampled on and dirtied.

I looked up the word "Stolpersteine" in a dictionary and the next word underneath it, was "stolz" (proud) – it was an inspiration. During my research on the N. Israel firm, I learned they were proud that their firm stood right in the center of the town. I am proud too – to be a Jew, a woman, and from Africa. And so I developed the "Stones-of-Pride" as an alternative project to the stumbling stones.[6]

By inserting a commerative stone into her paintings, people "look up" to the person's life, thus honoring the memory of a person and their lifetime achievements, instead of "looking down" on them, as one does with a Stolperstein, which is set in the pavement. Dessa is very outspoken about the message that the Stolpersteine sends in contemporary society:

Ich fordere jeden Deutschen auf, sich zu überlegen, wie die Nazis der 30er-Jahre die Stolpersteine sehen würden. Meiner Meinung nach materialisiert dieses Projekt ihren größten Wunsch: Schaut, wie viele ermordete Juden es gab – das haben wir geschafft. (I challenge every German to reconsider, how the Nazis would react to seeing the Stolpersteine. In my opinion, the (Stolpersteine) project realizes their final wish by proclaiming: look how many Jews we succeeded in murdering.)[7]

Major exhibitions

Publications

External links

References

  1. ↑ Frank Harders-Wuthenow. Do we smile or do we weep? Paintings based on Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia from Peter Grimes, Assens, May 31, 2015.
  2. ↑ "Boosey & Hawkes: The Classical Music Specialists". boosey.com.
  3. ↑ "Dominique Gesseney-Rappo, compositeur". gesseney-rappo.ch.
  4. ↑ Françoise Jaunin. Abstraction lyrique, , Lausanne, 1992.
  5. ↑ Alice Lanzke. "Ich folge meinem Weg – Deborah Petroz-Abeles ist stolz auf ihr Judentum und ihre afrikanische Herkunft", Jüdische Allgemeine, Berlin , 12 November 2015.
  6. ↑ Deborah Petroz Abeles. , Stolzesteine – Stones-of-Pride, Berlin, November, 2015.
  7. ↑ Alice Lanzke. Schweizer Künstlerin Dessa: Stolpersteine in der Kritik", Deutschlandradio Kultur, Berlin, Februar 5, 2016.
  8. ↑ Mitte Museum, Berlin
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