Gerda Stein

A piece made in witness to the continued reverberations of the Holocaust, Gerda Stein records the absence of its namesake. Sent to a Nazi concentration camp, Stein was first dehumanized—her hair shorn, her soft dress replaced by the scratchy fabric of a prisoner’s garb—and eventually murdered. By translating her lost dress into a glass vessel—star-yellow and slashed, as if in ritual mourning—Kolbe-Růžičková has memorialized Stein’s humanity and pointed to the incalculable impact of so many extinguished lives.