It is with great emotion that Galerie Christophe Gaillard announces both the discovery and exhibition of an exceptional collection of 84 works by 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.
The discovery of these new works is deeply moving and also informs us about the conditions of producing art when one is both a woman and Romani, with the poverty of means adding to the prohibition of bearing witness outside the community. There's a strong temptation to evoke Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One’s Own" as the kitchen that delimited Ceija's existence was also her workspace. It resonates deeply with the work of the British author.
"Ceija Stojka is an extraordinary narrator. She grew up with her grandmother's tales and is deeply rooted in the Romani tradition of storytelling. You can feel it when she recalls: what she recounts is often horrific, but the way she tells it is marvelous." Karin Berger, the one who enabled Ceija to testify (first through spoken word, then through drawing), understood this perfectly.
We hope that everyone who sees this exhibition will appreciate the artist's formidable lucidity, as well as her resilience, which enabled her to carry on living.
Ceija Stojka was born in Austria in 1933, the fifth of six children in a Romani family of horse merchants. Deported at the age of nine with her mother Sidonie and other family members, she survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. Forty-five years later, in 1988, at the age of fifty-five, she felt the need and necessity of speaking out. She embarked on a fantastic journey of remembrance and, although considered illiterate, wrote several poignant works in a poetic and highly personal style, making her the first Romani woman survivor of the death camps to testify about her concentration camp experience against oblivion, denial, and pervasive racism. Her testimony extends beyond the texts she published (four books in total between 1988 and 2005), which quickly established her as a pro-Roma activist in Austrian society. From the 1990s onwards, she began painting and drawing, also entirely self-taught in this field. She devoted herself wholeheartedly to it until her death in 2013. Her paintings and drawings, created over twenty years on paper, thin cardboard or canvas, number around a thousand pieces.
Her work has been exhibited in Germany, Austria, the United States, France at the Friche Belle de Mai (Marseille) and at the Maison rouge (Paris) in 2018, in Spain at the Reina Sofía (Madrid) in 2019, and in the United States at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York in 2023.
In 2026, she will have an exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York. Her works are part of major collections: at the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, ES), the Pinault Collection (Paris, FR), the Wien Museum (Vienna, AT), the Erste Collection (Vienna, AT), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm, SE), the Memorial Site CC (Ravensbrück, DE), the MUCEM (Marseille, FR), and the Collection Antoine de Galbert (Paris, FR).
