Archivals of the month January 2021
Artist's book by Gerhild Ebel
The Halle artist Gerhild Ebel will receive the Halle Art Award 2020. This will be the occasion to look at her book-artistic work and to exhibit one of her books as “Archivale of the Month” in the entrance area of the Archivverbund Dessau.
Gerhild Ebel was born in Halle (Saale) in 1965. She studied phytopathology at the Martin Luther University Halle (diploma 1990) and worked at the Institute for Plant Protection Halle. At the end of the 1980s she began to work in the border area of art, language and science. She created installations, artist books, graphics, performances, embossed prints, paper cuts with cutter, objects and experimental literature. In addition to her own work, she appears as a publisher of collections on experimental art and literature. These include the artists’ magazine “miniature obscure” (together with C. Ahnert, 1991-2007), the original graphic edition “quartett” (2008-2015) and the encyclopedia for literature and art “art lex” (since 2015). Meanwhile, she can look back on 50 book publications in various publishing houses. She showed her works in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad and received various art awards and scholarships. Her works are in more than 50 international museums and collections, including Dessau-Roßlau.
The Anhaltische Landesbücherei Dessau is in charge of the artist’s book collection of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, which, financed by the state since 1997, now comprises more than 550 objects. The focus of this collection is on works by artists from Saxony-Anhalt or a content-related reference to the state. Gerhild Ebel is represented in this collection with many of her works.
Her artist book “novel” was published in 1999 in an edition of 35 copies. It is one of a series of works in which Gerhild Ebel uses the technique of paper cutting with a cutter. “In her artist’s books and installations cut, novel and short story, the meaning and appearance of language, its appearance and extinction are not treated solely as aesthetic categories, but as sociological phenomena. They are books without text, carried solely by the patterns of visual memory and at the same time symbols of speechlessness and loss of language.” (Jena Municipal Art Collections)
Ebel, Gerhild: novel. Berlin : Uwe Warnke Verlag, 1999 (Exemplar 7/35)
Stadtarchiv Dessau-Roßlau, Anhaltische Landesbücherei, Signatur: KB 2002 A 68
(Eigentum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt)