Silvia Dzubas, The Lost Letters

Paintings of Silvia Dzubas remind us of the disappeared letters. Since childhood Silvia Dzubas was fascinated by letters. The English language has this wonderful double meaning for letter as a single character and at the same time as a written letter that combines many characters to sentences which you can write to somebody as a personal message. Dzubas felt very strongly how these letters from the distant past are trying to speak to her like personal mail. But these magical letters were on first sight secrets to her, she was fascinated by the shapes, by the unusual aesthetic forms. She felt attracted by the strange inscriptions, signs, symbols, ideograms on early stones or clay tablets, incised on stone or metal objects or written in cuttlefish ink (sepia), which recorded the knowledge and experience of the ancestors. She discovered in the Epigraphical Museum within the National Archaeological Museum of Athens in Greece the largest collection of inscriptions of its kind in the world. It comprises 14.000 funerary inscriptions, mostly Greek, mainly from Attica, but also some Hebrew. Chronologically, the inscriptions range from the eight century B.C., the age of Homer, to the Late Roman era. The contents of the inscriptions are honorary decrees, alliance treaties, calendars, economic accounts with first numerical signs or boundary stones for sanctuaries. She discovered, for example, the marble stele-boundary stone (horos) of the sanctuary of Demeter on Thasos, with inscription from the late 6th-early 5th century B.C.1 As she deciphered the Greek text: "I am Demeter, I am a landmark" DHMHTR OSEIMI TOKATO M.. ELO, she had a strong feeling of being addressed directly in spite of thousands of years between the origin of this text and today. This was very touching for her. She decided to use her medium as a painter, to give this grey stones more color and to transfer the antique text and medium to her canvases using many layers. Finally the paintings look sometimes like

Dzubas, SilviaDie Berliner Künstlerin Silvia Dzubas wurde 1946 in Berlin in eine Malerfamilie hineingeboren. Onkel und Grossonkel waren in die Emigration gegangen, ihr Vater blieb in Deutschland, tauchte während des Nazionalsozialismus unter. Silvia Dzubas wuchs in Ostberlin auf, wurde als jüngstes Kind stark von beiden Seiten der Familienerlebnisse geprägt. 1968 Flucht aus der DDR über Prag, Wien Westberlin1972 Aufenthalt in Amerika New York , Boston Stanford und Besuch beim Onkel und bekannten Maler Friedel Dzubas.1973 Rückkehr nach Deutschland, die Künstlerin pendelt zwischen Griechenland und Berlin. Zahlreiche Einzelausstellungen und Gruppenausstellungen.