Most people would remember Olga Horak as one of Australia’s most prominent Holocaust survivors who was always gracious with her time and story, sharing it with those who visited the Sydney Jewish Museum. But what most people don’t know, is that Horak was also a brilliant artist.
Now, the public will be able to share in Horak’s artistic legacy, with a new exhibition opening at Goldstone Gallery, In Her Light.
Nina Sanadze, artistic director of the Goldstone Gallery, said Horak’s art was about to be lost.
“I came across Olga and her work in 2023, and after her passing in 2024, I was fortunate to help preserve her archive — 146 artworks — just as they were about to be dispersed through a house auction, without ever being properly exhibited, seen, or understood. Her artistic legacy was at real risk of being lost to history but deserves to be recognised as the important Australian artist she truly was,” Sanadze said.
“They were my diary when the words failed me. Over and over again, my art brought me the happiness that is hard to find in other aspects of one’s life…” Olga Horak
As Dr Jana Vytrhlik, art historian and curator of Judaica, and Horak’s friend said, Sanadze has made it possible for Horak’s visual voice to be heard.
Vytrhlik recognised Olga’s talent after discovering her artworks in 2023. She immediately began writing about Olga as an artist and advocating for her work to be exhibited and acknowledged — and is now delighted to see it finally coming to fruition.
“Until 2023, no one outside her family knew Olga Horak was an artist,” Vytrhlik wrote in an essay published on the Goldstone Gallery website. “To the wider world, she was the sophisticated lady with coiffed white hair and elegant dresses – an eloquent speaker and author who recounted her harrowing experiences during the Holocaust, educating schoolchildren as well as government ministers and international guests. Over the years, many pages and photographs documented the life of Olga Horak, the Holocaust survivor. Yet her artistic talents came to light only shortly before her death.”
Vytrhlik first met Horak in the 1990s during her early years at the Museum, and when she began to visit Horak in her home in 2022, she was privileged to see Horak’s artistic side.
“Visiting her was like stepping back in time into a living room reminiscent of spacious homes in Prague, Bratislava, Budapest or Vienna – an upholstered settee, porcelain figurines and ornaments, Persian rugs on parquetry floors, and genre paintings by Australian and European artists,” Vytrhlik recalled. “Barely over a year ago, a chance question over a cup of coffee, followed by a walk upstairs revealed another world – an entire floor filled with Olga’s own paintings and sculptures.”
She recalled Horak saying that her art was never for anybody else, just for herself. That it brought her back to her youth in her native Bratislava, where she had private lessons as a talented teenager, before it was taken from her with her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Horak was liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
“Art brought me back to my youth, to the times when I first discovered the joy of creating. I didn’t need anybody’s opinion then, and I don’t need it now,” Vytrhlik recalls Horak saying. “My paintings and sculptures are not for public eyes. They were my diary when the words failed me. Over and over again, my art brought me the happiness that is hard to find in other aspects of one’s life.”
After migrating to Australia in 1949 with her husband Jan Horak, also a survivor, Horak rebuilt her life as an entrepreneur and mother. In 1960, she enrolled in evening art classes, set up a small studio in her Sydney home and as Vytrhlik wrote, “the artist she was always destined to be, was reborn”.
Notably, Horak always said that she didn’t want her art to be about the horrors she endured during the Holocaust. Initially, though, she said it was inevitable that her art mirrored her experiences.
“I wanted to express myself with happy colours and shapes. But initially, the colours turned black and my flowers turned into dark skulls. It was not intentional, it happened,” Vytrhlik recalled Horak saying. “And it was the same with my sculpting. I carved in timber and soapstone, and the shapes turned into the skinny skeleton-like figures. They were reflection of the walking skeletons I used to see in Auschwitz … and I was one of them. And the birds were hungry too, and instead of modelling Bondi seagulls, the skinny native bird brolga begging for food came out.”
But as Vytrhlik explained, Horak’s art did eventually focus on creation and expression, “offering a form of personal freedom from the past”.
Horak produced still lifes – evoking the styles of Cubism and Fauvism – figurative paintings that drew on Picasso and Chagall among others, and sculptures made from materials such as resin, patinated plaster, timber, cement, wood and fibreglass.
One of her sculptures, created in 1994, was displayed in the ground floor of the Sydney Jewish Museum. According to Vytrhlik, sharing this with the world was part of Horak’s transformation.
“It was as if Olga decided that the time had come to speak, and that she would be heard,” Vytrhlik wrote.
Son of Men, Keep not Silent was created to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the family’s deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Horak reinterpreted the traditional menorah, fracturing it into a six-branched candelabrum to commemorate the six million Jews murdered.
Horak’s artistic legacy remained silent. Until Sanadze stumbled upon it.
“Even after her death, Olga continues to teach us, this time not with words, but through the generosity of feeling and colour. Her art, now revealed publicly for the first time, arrives at a critical moment. It is of this moment! As the vow of “Never Again” falters under a rising tide of antisemitism — which Olga witnessed and warned of before her passing in 2024 — and as the Holocaust is grotesquely distorted against Jewish people, her work stands as both a solace and a call to conscience,” Sanadze told The AJN.
“Her bold, light-filled abstractions, and vibrant depictions of flowers, fruit, and female figures pulse with life and hope. Through art, Olga rehumanised the world, and herself, after surviving unimaginable horror. She chose to believe in humanity again. She trusted us. We must not fail her now.”
Sanadze was struck by Horak’s creativity, vibrancy, colour and the sense of freedom her artwork portrayed. She said it stands as a powerful expression of defiance and resilience, “revealing her true voice and her urgent need to contribute beauty and healing to the world”.
“Through art, Olga rehumanised the world, and herself, after surviving unimaginable horror. She chose to believe in humanity again…” Nina Sanadze
“This spirited creativity feels all the more poignant when seen against the backdrop of her experiences as a Holocaust survivor—defying the expectations one might have of art born from such trauma. Instead of darkness, Olga offers light, demonstrating the transformative power of art and the indomitable human spirit.”
While Horak didn’t live to see her artwork honoured and exhibited, she was never silenced, not in her words or in her art.
As Vytrhlik wrote in a tribute to Horak, her friend, “the horrors of the Holocaust shaped her, but they did not silence her. Her words and her art urge us to remember, and to be her voice. The stage where Olga once shared her story may now be quiet, but her wisdom – her message of humanity and hope – will continue to be heard…”
In Her Light features nearly 100 paintings, drawings, and several sculptures, and marks the first comprehensive presentation of Horak’s art and her debut solo show posthumously. The exhibition celebrates Horak’s immense talent and honours her legacy, shining a light on an extraordinary life expressed through art.
Olga Horak: In Her Light will be exhibited at Goldstone Gallery from April 30 – June 1. For more information, visit goldstonegallery.com
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