Helena Scigala

Helena Scigala, born 1965 in Polish Farther Pomerania, is listed in a book on young visual artists in the GDR as one of 25 people who, alongside painters like Walter Womacka or sculptors like Werner Stötzer, most saliently shaped the post-war art of East Germany.[1] This was the era in which Scigala, then living in Berlin, experienced her most fertile period as a graphic artist. Besides numerous solo exhibitions, Scigala was the only woman chosen (alongside 14 male colleagues) to represent the work of graphic artists in the GDR at the international competitive exhibition IBA Leipzig 1965. Steadily building her oeuvre from 1954 on, she established herself as one of the most important woodcut artists of the GDR with her cycle on the tropical doctor Albert Schweitzer. At the same time, Scigala made confession of her humanist worldview, as is evident at least from 1959 through her work for the publishing houses associated with the East German Christian Democratic Party (one of the so-called block parties attempting to carve out a separate policy program within the political structure dominated by the SED), a position she confirmed in 1972 by becoming an official member of that party. Her forceful and uncompromising oeuvre is seen "in the tradition of a late expressionism, mollified in its expression."[2] According to the same source, Scigala’s depictions of men and women are not loud, but strong. They are always reduced to the essential and elevated to the universal.  

Throughout the 30 years of her creative period, the theme of "mother and child" appears time and again in her work. And she no doubt drew from personal experience: At the age of six, Scigala was committed to a Protestant orphanage in Berlin-Pankow by her destitute parents; and we find her living with her young son as a single mother immediately after completing her studies at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (East Berlin, 1947– 50) and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin-Charlottenburg (West Berlin, 1949– 51).  

Scigala’s admiration of and affinity with Käthe Kollwitz is unmistakable. She shared with Kollwitz an "intensity of motherly, activist feeling and an energetic partisanship."[3] Scigala’s clearly contoured graphics adorn the covers of countless books published in the GDR; her Anne-Frank portrait was known to every seventh-grader in the East German schools. The folklore scenes, too, which she cut in the manner of a relief for what was at the time the world’s longest wooden frieze, adorning the building constructed for the Soviet specialty restaurant Baikal, are firmly anchored in the memories of East Berliners. Despite all that, the sensitive and humble Scigala, who remained independently employed all her life, never really forged a grand career – even though her professor and mentor Arno Mohr averred that "the younger generation of graphic artists in the GDR, to which Helena Scigala belongs, reached a level of artistic quality in their work, compared with which West German artists of the same age have nothing to offer."[4] 

Helena Scigala was for a long time viewed by the state as having no parents and no nationality. Only in 1972 – at the insistence of the Verband Bildender Künstler (Artists’ Union) – did she acquire full rights of citizenship in the GDR. Despite reaching the age of retirement in 1981, and despite the physical ailments that plagued her – stemming in part from her work as one of the women sorting through the rubble after the war to re-build their lives – Scigala kept working to avoid destitution in her old age. Without any notable success, however. The woman who took the weak as her perpetual subject died in 1998, at 77 years of age. She is among the "lost women"[5] of art, as her son Martin Scigala testifies. Nevertheless, in his capacity as administrator of her estate, he has for several years now sought to validate the legacy of this woman, who with her more complex colored woodcuts earned a unique place within the artistic landscape of the GDR. At the same time, he hopes to complete a group biography of the Pankow Art Circle of the Verband Bildender Künstler, an institution shaped to a significant extent by Helena Scigala, and whose network time and again offered her in return, despite everything, some humble advantages.

text: Sylvie Kürsten, translation: Darrell Wilkins

[1] Hütt, Wolfgang: Junge bildende Künstler der DDR : Skizzen zur Situation der Kunst in unserer Zeit, Leipzig 1965.

[2] Lang, Lothar: Künstlerinnen, in: Das Magazin, März 1976, p. 53-58.

[3] Catalogue text for an exhibition at the Berlin television tower 1983.

[4] Neues Deutschland, 1959.

[5] https://www.helenascigala.de/