Her quick, light touch creates a style that might be described as naive; sometimes the artist has thickened the paint with sand, emphasising her expressionistic materiality. Compositions recur from one painting to another, creating a dynamic that is characteristic of her work. But the threat already looms: Travelling Through a Field of Sunflowers in Summer imposes a sense of distance, concealment, even. All around, pink, orange and violet skies suggest a metaphorical twilight preceding the cold snows of a winter that will last for long, long years.
HIDDEN, SCARED, DEPORTED
Following her father’s, Wackar, arrest, Sidonie her mother and the children went into hiding for many long months, sometimes staying with friends, or friends of friends, sometimes hidden in a park in Vienna’s 16th District, not far from their little house, now ringed with barbed wire. A series of ink drawings is from what the artist herself called her ‘dark works’ (as opposed to her ‘light works’). The contrast of black and white, and a sharper stroke, give them a more overtly graphic style. “Where is your father?” one asks: “They took him away.” Little Ceija's memories mix in with the artist’s nightmares, just as the Nazis’ shouted orders are mixed in with snatches from sentences uttered by friends and family, and her own thoughts: Quiet! Mother, where are you? and The trains are already full but they’ve still got to get in. Move on. Go on, go on! Go on, everyone to Auschwitz! I can’t forget.
A remarkable picture; we can just make out the frightened faces of shadows caught in the tangle of lines depicting the trees of Kongresspark that practically cover the entire canvas (Untitled, 15.03.2003). The upright presentation enables us to see an example of how Ceija covered the back of certain paintings with chalk drawings and clumsily spelt polyphonic phrases - the often-phonetic transcriptions made by someone who was never able to attend school regularly, much to her regret and despite all her parents’ efforts. On March 3rd, 1943, Ceija, her mother, brothers and sisters were locked away in Vienna’s Rossauer Lände prison. However, these works do not portray this one arrest but all the arrests suffered by Roma people, which Ceija imagines in, for example, Found or "Where are our Roma?" Laaerberg, 1938.