The first solo exhibition of the Roma painter and writer at the Museum of the City of Łódź
“If the world doesn’t change now – if the world doesn’t open its doors and windows – if it doesn’t build a room of real peace – so that my great-grandchildren will have the chance to live in this world, I won’t be able to explain why I survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück” (Ceija Stojka)
Although Stojka’s painting arose directly from her dramatic experience of the Holocaust, she did not begin to paint until several decades after the end of the Second World War. She was not a professionally trained painter. However, regardless of this, her painting is an extremely strong and coherent artistic statement. Her work is one of the most poignant testimonies to the Holocaust, and at the same time a testimony that is very mature in its form.
Stojka built the composition of her paintings around poignant, usually highly dynamic frames. She had an extraordinary capacity for detail, which was particularly evident in her nostalgic depictions of her pre-war childhood. But also to create symbolic and synthetic compositions, which was particularly evident when she depicted direct images of death. Many of her works take the form of retrospective documents, although many of them are attempts to depict situations that Stojka did not witness. There are recurring motifs in her paintings that lead us to read her paintings as symbolic. All the works show what a sensitive colourist she was – after all, colour had its own very important meaning in her work. Some of her works are downright abstract compositions.
Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) – Roma artist and writer. She was born and spent her early years in Styria, Austria. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, her family were sent to concentration camps. Stojka was only ten years old when she was sent to Auschwitz. She survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. Of her entire family of around two hundred people, only six survived the war: she, her mother and four siblings.
It was only in the 1980s, more than forty years later, that she finally broke her silence and became one of the first Roma women to speak out about her memories and experiences of the Holocaust. She described her childhood in several books and in more than 1,500 paintings and drawings. Stojka was a self-taught artist who gradually developed her own style, incorporating bright colours and strong expressiveness. She painted not only with a brush but also with her hands, and all her work was done at home, in the kitchen or in the living room.
The Łódź exhibition, the artist’s first presentation in Poland, traces Stojka’s life, a period of happy childhood, deportation, time in concentration camps and liberation. The exhibition will be accompanied by curatorial tours, lectures and workshops.
