Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Annette Kelm's new project "The Books", running concurrently to presentations of the same series at Museum Frieder Burda, Salon Berlin, and the Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, Munich. Initiated in 2019, the series documents a wide range of publications proscribed by Nazi party as being “un-German" beginning in 1933 and later burned. In documenting the physical, surviving copies of these titles, Kelm pays tribute to these books as “survivors” that stood the test of time, acting as proxies for their authors and keeping them alive in collective memory. In doing so, Kelm focuses both on the liberal, enlightened metropolitan zeitgeist that allowed for the publication of these books, as well the graphic and artistic innovations of their cover designs, which reflect the avant-garde spirit of the 1920s and 1930s. Dust jackets, which became popular in the late nineteenth century and rose to prominence with the Book Art movement, took up the formal languages of Expressionism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, and Dada, often displaying photomontages and experimental typography. Through an examination of the more than 100 titles included in the project, it becomes clear that the Nazi regime not only set out to silence the content of these titles, but also to extinguish the burgeoning artistic freedom, and modernist aesthetic apparent in their design. In documenting these destroyed and forgotten books, Kelm strives to recall their memory, and resiliency in a time when far-right voices gain voices not only in Germany but across the globe.
