At The MoMA

Detail

Marcel Odenbach, German, born 1953

You Can't See the Forest for the Trees
2003

Cut-an-pasted printed paper, cut-and-pasted colored paper, ink, and pencil on two pieces of paper

The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift, 2005

Odenbach's upbringing in postwar Germany was inextricably linked with the country's sociopolitical history, a heritage he addresses in his compositions though the bits of text and images culled from a variety of mass-media sources that often fade into the background of the larger drawings. You Can't See the Forest for the Trees plays on a common expression and is a plea to not only see this particular forest as a forest but also take into account its context: the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was named after the many birch trees surrounding the complex.