Neuve Invention

Source: Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia

(Germany, 1935 – USA 2007)
Koczÿ was born March 5, 1939, in Recklinghausen, Germany, the eldest daughter of Martha Wusthoff and Karl Koczÿ, both Jews. She was deported in 1942 at the age of 3 and survived two concentration camps, first at Traunstein (Dachau) and then at Ottenhausen (Struthof). Fifty years after the war’s end she wrote of that time:
« We worked in the fields every day. I saw the killings, the shavings, the bleachings, the torture and hunger, the cold, typhus, tuberculosis. Death was all around ! »
Remaining at Ottenhausen for several years after its liberation in 1945, she was raised afterwards by her maternal grandparents, her mother briefly and several foster families and orphanages.
In 1959 Koczÿ left Germany for Geneva, Switzerland. She was accepted into the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in 1961, where she received her diploma with distinction four years later.
Koczÿ’s first marriage (which brought her Swiss citizenship) ended in divorce. She married composer Louis Pelosi, whom she had met at the MacDowell Colony, in 1984. She became an American citizen in 1989.
Koczÿ created a community art school outside of Geneva in the 1970s and in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where she taught privately over the last twenty years of her life. After 1995 she gave free lessons to elderly and disabled residents of Maple House in Ossining, where she supplied materials, arranged shows and acquisitions (many by her and her husband). The couple also hosted annual art and music gatherings in their home for many years.
She died December 12, 2007, in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

Collections
Koczÿ’s work is housed in institutions such as the Guggenheim (both in New York and Venice), the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Art Gallery/Museum, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne (where in 1985 she inaugurated Jean Dubuffet’s Neuve Invention Annex), Museum im Lagerhaus in St. Gallen, Museum Charlotte Zander in Bonnigheim (Germany), Galerie Miyawaki in Kyoto (Japan), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, the Gedenkstatte Buchenwald, Musée de la Création Franche in Begles (France), Museum Dr. Guislain in Gent Belgium) and Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem (which in 2007 accepted her largest sculpture, Deportation of the Children, into its permanent collection).