The Galerie Christophe Gaillard is particularly pleased and proud to present its fifth solo exhibition devoted to the artist Ceija Stojka, on the eve of a remarkable year for this Romani artist, who will be honored by no fewer than three major museum retrospectives (at the Drawing Center in New York, curated by Lynne Cooke; at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Besançon; and at FRAC Normandie Rouen). In parallel with these exhibitions, two publications will be released in 2026.
On the occasion of this new exhibition, the gallery will unveil an unprecedented group of works, including a painting of exceptional scale—the largest ever produced by the artist, achieved only three times, one of which has just entered the collections of the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. The gallery will also present several of the last color scenes, shown here for the first time, which bear witness to Ceija Stojka’s experience in the concentration camps and, more broadly, to the Romani genocide (Samudaripen).
This exhibition will also provide the opportunity to present the new volume in our Mémoires Vives collection, Ceija Stojka: Le jour lui n’a qu’un jour (from which the exhibition takes its title), the result of the research grant of the Résidence Le Tremblay and the work of its recent recipient, Elora Weill-Engerer.
Born in 1933 in Kraubath, Styria (Austria), into a family of Romani Lovara horse traders, Ceija Stojka was the fifth of six children. Deported at the age of ten with her mother and other members of her family, she survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen.
Forty-five years later, in 1988, Ceija Stojka began an extraordinary work of remembrance. Despite having received no formal schooling, she published four books between 1988 and 2005 and became the first Romani woman in Austria to publicly bear witness to the deportation of the Roma and Sinti. Through her artistic and literary commitment, Stojka established herself as a major political and cultural figure for the Roma. Her poetic and deeply personal writing stands against silence, denial, and the anti-Gypsy racism that remains widespread in Europe. From the 1990s onward, she turned to painting and drawing, producing more than a thousand works over two decades—on paper, cardboard, or canvas—using a variety of techniques (gouache, ink, acrylic), until shortly before her death in 2013. Her work has been exhibited in Austria, Germany, France, Spain, and the United States, and today enjoys international recognition.
* “Le jour lui n’a qu’un jour. Sept textes sur Ceija Stojka” by Elora Weill-Engerer, published by Éditions Sombres torrents.
