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Zagreus Projekt, Berlin
5 March – 14 April, 2020

Gabrielle Rossmer – sculpture
Luther Price – film
Sonya Gropman – paint

This exhibition is about THE OBJECT – specifically related to cooking and eating – as it embodies time, place, and meaning. Time (both present and past), place (here, in Germany – and there, in the U.S.), and meaning (the human experience including nourishment, loss, connection to the land, emigration, re-connection, creation, recreation). This exhibit is about today, as it has been informed by the past; about welcoming our own history as part of a living present.

HE OBJECT: When the Rossmer (nee Rossheimer) family (Gabrielle, a one-year old baby, along with her parents Erna and Stefan) fled Nazism in 1939, all of the objects from their home – from furniture, to linens to kitchenware — travelled in a lift van (a large, wooden moving crate) to New York City. Most of these objects survive today, and have been in continual daily use since then.

There is an irony to the Nazi law which required Jews to pack their household items and then pay a tax on them (their own belongings!), as a way to create a discontinuation of Jewish life in Germany; this actually led, in our family at least, to a sense of continued connection to our family’s former life in Germany.

All three artists explore the same objects from different perspectives and in different media –sculpture, film and paint. Gropman’s work is brand new, Price’s is archival and Rossmer’s is new work that reflects its own history.

Rossmer and Gropman are mother and daughter. They are the co-authors of “The German Jewish Cookbook: Recipes & History of a Cuisine”, (2017, Brandeis University Press). They wrote it to preserve a food tradition that has largely faded, along with the culture of German Jews. Those who survived the 1930’s have almost entirely merged with the cultures of the lands to which they immigrated. The kitchen is the place where German-Jewish culture has been most clearly preserved, with families often maintaining some of the recipes of their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers (and sometimes, as in our family, grandfathers). That might include dishes for Passover (Pesach), the eight-day holiday that celebrates liberation and prohibits leavened food; Chanukah, when fried foods are eaten; Berches, the bread eaten for the weekly Sabbath, or other holidays.