Ceija Stojka – The sunflower is the flower of the Roma

Ceija Stojka is an Austrian Roma artist, painter, and poet whose work is intimately linked to her personal history and the memory of the Nazi genocide of the Roma. Her drawings bear witness to the years spent in concentration camps, while her colorful paintings evoke her nomadic life after the war, a life poised between painful memories and hope. Deported as a child with her family, she endured the horrors of the camps as the promises of beauty embodied by Claude Monet and his Water Lilies seemed shattered. Years later, however, her work continues along the same thread: that of hope for humanity despite the violence she has experienced.

The exhibition also reveals a more bucolic side of his work, where images of nature and comfort coexist with the memory of traumas, in a constant tension between light and darkness.

With the support of the Christophe Gaillard gallery