Nicole Bunis Final Review - Ceija Stojka: Making Visible

The Drawing Center’s Ceija Stojka: Making Visible features over sixty artworks by the Roma artist in her first comprehensive retrospective in New York. The work spans the two and half floors of the SoHo gallery. The gallery walls alternate between deep purple and white which provides a nice backdrop for Stojka’s vibrant color choices. Stojka received no formal training as an artist. The exhibition has a greater impact thanks to the inclusion of Stojka’s journals and sketchbooks on the lower level of the gallery. There is also a large timeline detailing the chronology of Roma history which tracks the growing persecution they faced as Hitler came to power. These archival pieces offer an intimate look into Stojka’s artistic process and her personal reckoning with her trauma. 

Stojka’s artwork shines a light on the often overlooked and untold story of survival and resilience among Romani Holocaust survivors. The artist herself survived multiple concentration camps including Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbrück. The exhibition features paintings and sketches that encapsulate life before and after Stojka’s family was deported from their hometown of Vienna and forced into concentration camps. 

The introductory text reveals that Stojka did not start painting until her late fifties, when she picked up a paintbrush with her granddaughters. So many years after her internment, Stojka turned to art as a therapeutic act of processing past trauma and bearing witness to moments of persecution that history has largely left untold. 

One painting titled Auschwitz, 1944, is a perfect encapsulation of the duality at the heart of Stojka’s work. A field of green is dotted with purple flowers; in the distance a smokestack pours clouds of gray and black smoke across a cloudy gray-pink sky. A flock of large birds move across the sky and in the right corner there is a guard tower with an inscription that reads “Auschwitz, 1944” in white letters.The scene is at once peaceful and deeply unsettling. 

Stojka’s artistic style evokes a haunting children’s-book quality. Much of her work taps into memories from a childhood spent in unimaginable circumstances. Stojka was only nine years old when she first entered the camps. The bright colors, loose brushstrokes, small stick-like figures, and animals take on a monstrous quality within the context of the camps. The artist’s decision to paint on cardboard suggests a sense of urgency to paint these scenes as quickly as possible. These images and stories of survival demand to be painted immediately no matter the material at hand. 

Running through it all is Stojka’s fierce pride in her Roma heritage. This is visible in her scenes of life before the German invasion of Austria in 1938. Fields of sunflowers which are a symbol for Roma people, are a beautiful reminder of the artist’s unshakeable optimism in spite of the horrors she endured. Stojka’s paintings force us not to look away from the atrocities of the past while presenting moments of quiet beauty in spite of the devastation. The exhibition runs from February 20th to June 7th, 2026 and should not be missed.