Impermanent Collection is the first solo show in Greece of the American artist Heide Fasnacht.

 

In her new body of work that consists of an installation and a series of drawings, Heide Fasnacht deals with a particular chapter of art history; the “fate” of thousands of art objects that were sold, robbed or confiscated and ended up in Germany during World Word II. Historically, the work in this exhibition is based upon photo documentation of the art theft made by the Nazis, beginning in 1939 when they started culling “degenerate” works from museums and private collections until the end of the war. After the war, the Allies gathered it in to collecting points and attempted to return works to their original owners. Despite this, many works were stolen by the Russians, "sold" into important European collections, stolen by Allied soldiers, and destroyed during battles.

 

Fasnacht’s installation and drawings depict collecting points from which they redistributed work or empty spaces. One can see poignancy in the vast storerooms of maligned, neglected and discarded works and in the acquisition of works of art through deadly means. For the artist the content of her new work extends beyond the bare historical facts. It is an alternative art history. It is a reshuffled deck that by no means is over yet.

 

Since the artist’s first solo show at P.S. 1 in 1979, Heide Fasnacht has been a constant presence in the New York art scene. Exhibiting continuously both in the Us and abroad, her works have been on view, and are in the permanent collections of, the MFA Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Walker Art Center, and the Yale University Art Gallery. She has also been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a National Endownment for the Arts Award, a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, a Tiffany Foundation Grant. Fasnacht has most recently exhibited large scale on-site works for Smack Mellon, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the RISD Museum.  Fasnacht received her BFA from RISD and her MA from NYU.

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