When Romanian-born artist Gabriella Kardos was a teenager, her family fled the Communist regime seeking a better life. Kardos was born in Bucharest during Ceausescu’s rule and at the age of 16, after spending eight months in a refugees camp in Vienna, she emigrated with her parents and sister to Montreal, Canada.
Kardos has been nominated for The Cass Art Prize, a new art prize being unveiled in London this week, with a painting that depicts Kardos’s 16 year old self in a Vienna amusement park, inspired by a photograph taken by her sister. Here she talks about how this teenage journey shaped her artistic practice.
What drew you to submit a work for The Cass Art Prize?
Even though I have been a practicing artist for 35 years not many people know I exist. My early achievements were validators of me as an artist and whoever sees them automatically assumes that I am an established artist. But I set my career aside for 20 years to bring up a child as a single mother after a divorce, living alone in England, which was for me a foreign country where I had no relatives to rely on. Between taking care of a child during the cost of living crisis, working at various jobs and also spending time in the studio there was no time left in the day to mingle in the art world. So opportunities eventually vanished. However, during this time my paintings continued to develop and my life became very enriched through the connection I built with my son. So it is only now that I’m emerging again, after having worked in obscurity for a very long time. When I saw The Cass Art Prize announcement I saw a once in a lifetime opportunity to be discovered after years of struggle.
Could you tell us a little more about your submitted work “Young Emigrant in Between Countries, Holding Two Ice Cream Cones in an Amusement Park in Vienna in 1976” its significance and what it represents for you, particularly in relation to your past experiences as a refugee?
The painting depicts a teenage girl holding two ice cream cones in an amusement park in Vienna. Having left her native land of communist Romania with her parents and sister in search of freedom she is standing at the crossroads between the past and the future, basking in a kind of lightness of being in the free world, away from the oppression she left behind. But freedom, of course, would come at a cost, and thus the inclusion of the smiling devil on top of a building in the distance above the girl’s head.
That 15 year old girl in the picture was once me. The inspiration came from an old photograph of myself taken by my twin sister in 1976 while on a day out on the outskirts of Vienna during the six months period in which we waited with our parents for either Canada or the US to accept us. The setting where the photograph was taken is Prater, an amusement park which still exists on the outskirts of Vienna; the ice cream place, Panciera is no longer there.
The painting is barely sketched, almost transparent, as I wanted to convey the feeling of memory mainly in black and white, barely coloured, seen through the fog of time. It represents a crucial moment in the girl’s life, the pure innocence she is bringing in an unknown world and her unknown future. The scene is bathed in sunshine, the girl smiling carefree, fully trusting the world she has landed in. But there are also intimations of darkness. We were living in limbo waiting for a country to accept us. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) put us up in an old building full of Russian refugees and gave us money to eat during our 6 months long wait in Vienna. What is interesting is that the setting of the photograph with its blissful light, the ice cream but also its ominous undercurrent is situated on the land which was once called Leopoldstadt, a Jewish ghetto outside Vienna which had undergone many pogroms and eventually deportations of its entire Jewish population to concentration camps. Yet at the time we were unaware of its history.
You’ve lived and worked in several countries, from Canada to the UK. How do these diverse environments influence your artistic practice and your exploration of identity? Do you find that your work shifts in response to the places you’ve called home?
I am my own home, my interior world, my memories, so this is what I respond to in my art, and since I move in the world, no matter where I am everything I experience would in turn influence my art. But it isn’t something I can necessarily define, because it is shifting. I would say yes, but in subtle ways, not as a direct response to actual places.
How does the act of creating art help you process your own memories and experiences?
It’s interesting what’s happening at the moment with my latest autobiographical work. By taking a small photograph I hold in the palm of my hand and painting it on a large canvas it’s as if I’m bringing these characters to life; by the very process of painting these people, either me and my twin or my parents all these memories come to life in a very palpable way. It’s arresting, my heart seems to beat faster, it’s as if I’m in a dream. When I paint these people who are my family (or draw on the etching plate ) I paint or draw with a concentration of love, and because of this the work gains a special quality of life which holds personal meaning to me. This whole autobiographical endeavour was stirred when I took a printmaking course at Morley College and started to look for subjects to work with. I was mourning the loss of my father and I thought that learning a new skill and mixing with other artists in a classroom would help me process this loss and transform it. Looking through an old box which I had not opened since I left Canada, I found an old zinc plate which I etched at the age of 19 — it was an image of my me at age 2 with my twin sister and the heads of my parents peaking into the image smiling, with a large bridge in the background. I brought the plate into Morley and experimented with adding colour via chine colle, a method of painting in watercolour and placing that painting under the press at the same time with the plate. So this has been the beginning which prompted me to look into old family photographs. Presently the autobiographical work I’m involved in is helping me consolidate my disrupted identity. In general, I am more concerned with landscapes of the mind and by extension memory than with just what is in front of me.
The Cass Art Prize Exhibition runs from 8–16 November 2024 at Copeland Gallery, London SE15
For more information on the artist visit www.gabriellakardos.com
