Heide Fasnacht continues to expand her definition of drawing through the use of new materials resulting here with a large drawing in progress for the main gallery. Conceptually, Fasnacht has been researching and documenting the storage rooms discovered by the OSS immediately following World War II that were implemented by the Nazi organization identified as the ERR.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring helped establish the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), directed by Alfred Rosenberg, the official Nazi office charged with confiscating prominent, mainly Jewish, art collections in the western Nazi-occupied territories. Housed in the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, the ERR operated from 1940 to 1944.

The ERR was the most elaborate of the Nazi confiscating agencies, and it looted more than twenty-one thousand individual objects from over two hundred Jewish-owned collections. For every object delivered to the Jeu de Paume Museum, a clearinghouse to process all French confiscations, ERR staff created an inventory card containing the artist’s name, medium, dimensions, and in many cases, a photograph. The ERR then organized the cards by codes based on the family’s name and a number: for example “R” for the Rothschild family, “D.W.” for David-Weill, and “SEL” for the Seligmann family in Paris. On many cards appears a stamp with either “AH” or “HG,” indicating if the object was going to Hitler’s museum in Linz or to Göring’s personal collection at Carinhall (Göring’s country house named in honor of his wife, Carin).

— From The Holocaust Records Preservation Project by Anne Rothfeld, 2002

Recently an artist in residence at Q Box in Athens, Greece, Fasnacht’s ERR Project will be accompanied by a series of related works on paper.