Born in Tel Aviv, 1973
Lives and works in Chicago and Tel Aviv

Nelly Agassi created a tribute to a self-portrait painted by Charlotte Solomon in 1940. She filmed herself in profile, a choice that is uncharacteristic of her videos, in which she usually appears with her face towards the viewer. Another screen features a shot of an empty white page. This white page represents what could have and did not happen, all the white pages Charlotte could have painted on, everything that was disrupted in its midst.


Charlotte Salomon

1917, Berlin, Germany
1943, Auschwitz, Poland

Charlotte Salomon is the "Anne Frank of art" - a young painter whose life was caught up in the devastating whirlpool of history. She was born in Berlin into an assimilated Jewish family, and her mother committed suicide when she was nine years old (Charlotte was told that she had died of pneumonia). When she was 18, she was accepted into Berlin's art academy, yet was forced to leave following the publication of the Nuremberg Laws. In 1939 she fled the Nazi regime by escaping to her maternal grandparents in the south of France. There, following her grandmother's suicide, she discovered that her mother had similarly taken her own life. Shaken by this realization, Solomon decided to choose life and art, and began telling the story of her own life.

Out of close to 1,300 paintings she created during the last year of her life, she chose about 800 to be included in the final version of her work Life? Or Theater?. She painted with gouache on paper, and accompanied her paintings with a text. In 1943 she was sent to Auschwitz with her husband and was murdered upon her arrival there. She was 26 years old, and pregnant. In the aftermath of the war, Charlotte's father arrived at her hiding place in France, discovered her paintings, and began exhibiting them. Today, they are in the collection of the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.