These perennials turn to the sun and thus to hope, an essential Christian virtue for a woman who thanked her faith, and the Virgin Mary, for her survival. A statue of the Holy Virgin, with or without an altar, features in many compositions – compositions we could swear we have seen before. She is always standing at a crossroads.
Covering pages and pages of the sketchbooks she hid in cupboards in her apartment, on the outskirts of Vienna, tracing again and again the contours of her existence with her paintbrush, and as often as not her finger, her main concern being simply to express herself.
Only four of her texts have been published, first in Austria, including We Live in Seclusion: The Memories of a Romni in 1988, Travellers on This World in 1992, Meine Wahl zu schreiben - ich kann es nicht in 2003, Träume ich, dass ich lebe? Befreit aus Bergen-Belsen in 2005 and Auschwitz ist mein Mantel in 2008 (in the catalogue of the same name). But many others could – and might – be published, such were the artist’s plethoric writings, both in her notebooks and on the front and back of her paintings.