EMMA ANDIJEWSKA
1931
Emma Andijewska
Born in Stalino, Ukraine on 19 March 1931. Since 43 in the West, lives in Germany. Member of the Ukrainen PEN-Club and the association “Free Academy Munich”.
Everything is astonishing about the art of Emma Andijewska: the quantity of her creations and the everyday and with every new work of art a new ascertained to create a hundred times more still, the language of her works that is enigmatic and magic, always new with a constant recognizeability and always surprisingly natural. Her vision of the world astounds through some primordiality that is obviously not for anybody else to feel and through the energy of impressions as well as through such a trusting sincerity in her own continuity.
The artist, like a magician, gives the wondrous beings sprung from her imagination freedom and consciousness about themselves.
Andijewska’s painting is to such an extent uniquely individual, that not so much the “what” and “how” are of essential relevance for the comprehension of it, but the “who” that is inspiring its formation. Understandably, nobody can claim to illuminate the spiritual world of an artist from one end to the other or to see the most remote corners of this inner landscape. But, nevertheless, one can ask why a known writer and poetess, author of over twenty books in her native Ukrainian language, who is equally recognized by critics and readers, has turned towards the expressive means of painting. Maybe because poetry is not translateable, whereas the language of painting is universal? Or maybe, because her by nature already synthetic gift has demanded other ways to express itself? Obviously, the painter that is the figures segmented, organically worked into the ornamental arranging of the background. All this refers to primal symbolic archetypes. The naivety of such a word view is obvious, but this naivety stands higher than any intellectualism. This is a straight-forwardness of view on the world that ignores everything transient, coincidental, external, longs after the true essence of things and is convinced, that this essence can be achieved.
Thanks to a consummate feel for tact, Andijewska never falls victim to overdoing stylization, when following the rules of primitive painting. The constantly present folkloristic principle in her paintings tells about itself merely in nuances of reception, in the character of interpretation and in the subtext of what is to be depicted – it is the second, mysterious and undeciphered meaning. It seems, that namely the tendency to a completeness provoked by the national roots in her works gives her style a definitely syncretistic character, that makes her an eternal offender of the rules of pureness as to directions and schools in painting as well as of the boundaries between facets of different forms of art. Due to a high degree of conventionality and her love for serial pictures she penetrates into the field of graphics. An exquisite pureness of contours and the symbolic power of the colours puts her works near to examples of stained glass windows. The only in details varied patterns of composition refer to the montage of film stills. A totally unrestricted creative boldness, indeed.
The encounter with the art of Emma Andijewska leaves us with the impression of being included into a certain theurgic transformation of the world into other categories and formulas. Her pictures are steps. They lead to a definite cleansing of all that’s ordinary and bottled up inside, to a research of the primal fountain of life and to a confluence with it. This encounter leaves no doubt that she is an artist by vocation, who hears the voice of the Absolute calling her, who has a very personal mission for being in the world and who experiences her creative work as a fatum.