It is sometimes argued that artworks ought ideally to be considered without reference to their maker's biography. It's a strategy for focusing upon their intrinsic aesthetic qualities, and can help to sharpen our visual appreciation. On the other hand, there are artists who demand we recognize their presence and realize what they have gone through in life. Rosemarie Koczÿ was one such, a maker of inspired drawings, pastels and paintings, gorgeous tapestries and stark woodcarvings which are inseparable from her personal experience.

Born to Jewish parents in 1939 at Recklinghausen, Northern Germany, she was deported at the age of three to the Traunstein concentration camp, near Dachau, and later to the Ottenhausen camp. Losing almost her entire family, and with death and misery all around, she somehow survived, only to be shoved into a succession of orphanages after the Liberation. Finally she reached Geneva, where in 1961 she was accepted into the École des Arts Décoratifs and received her diploma after four years of rigorous study, which included tapestry-making among many other disciplines. In 1973, she met the collector Peggy Guggenheim and contacted the museum director Thomas Messer, who encouraged her in her vocation. Yet rather than pursue a conventional style and career, she found her work overtaken by the compulsion to speak of the unspeakable, to bear witness to the traumas of the Holocaust. Her signature work emerged during the 1970s and 1980s, when she produced several thousand pen drawings of anonymous figures, emaciated shapes half-drowned in a kind of maelstrom of black needles. I once saw a wall display of several dozen of these images at the (now defunct) De Stadshof museum in Zwolle: the combination of ceaseless proliferation and searing emotion made an impact that struck to the very core of human feeling. The artist explained her output as a symbolic way of "weaving a shroud" for those she had seen perish. It is noteworthy that she also took time to write a memoir about the camps: over a thousand pages long, it is now lodged in the Holocaust museum archive in Jerusalem.

In 1984, she married the American composer Louis Pelosi, and lived with him in a house in the woods at Croton-on-Hudson, New York State, where, in addition to continuing her stream of drawings, she produced bulky wood sculptures and radiant yet hardly comforting paintings and pastels. She also gave art instruction to adults and children in her studio and with her husband sponsored artmaking among the elderly and disabled residents of a local seniors residence.

Rosemarie Koczÿ died of breast cancer on 12 December 2007, aged 68.

Roger Cardinal