Ceija Stojka

 

Carefully preserved by the family, these 84 paintings and drawings were created by the artist on the back of postcards reproducing her own works that museums or publishers helped to disseminate. A poignant testimony to the atrocity of the samudaripen (a term tracing the genocide that saw nearly half of Europe's Romani community disappear) and Ceija Stojka's own deportation experience with her entire family, it is a remarkable ensemble that the artist gives over about the two years spent in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Bergen Belsen, but also about the nomadic life that was hers before the camps and the return to civilian life. Thus, the few colorful landscapes of Styria in which the caravans are installed quickly give way to the stark black and white description of Nazi atrocities, before the return of the vast fields saturated with poppies and sunflowers beaten by the powerful force of the wind.