Trude Sojka

Gertrud Sojka, better known as Trude Sojka (9 December 1909 – 18 March 2007), was a Czech - Ecuadorian painter and sculptor, creator of an original technique using Recycledmaterials and concrete. She was born in Berlin, Germany and died in Quito, Ecuador.Gertrud Herta Sojka was born in December 9, 1909 in Berlin, German Empire of Czech parents, in the bosom of a wealthy Jewish family. 

 Trude Sojka's work evolves according to the various experiences in her life. Sojka studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin (Akademie der Künste), where she became familiar with German (such as Die Brücke) and Jewish Expressionism. She became familiar with the works of Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and Georges Rouault. She deeply admired the sculptures of Ernst Barlach and is likely to have personally known the work of the expressionist-realist Käthe Kollwitz.
Moreover, in Europe, Sojka became interested in the primitive art of Africa, Oceania and America (which can also be considered somehow expressionist). This she had surely learned visiting ethnographic museums. Thus, when after the war, in 1946, she came to Ecuador, she was amazed to discover so closely the Pre-Columbian Andean symbolism. Her first paintings in Ecuador, created during the years 1950, depict her experiences in the concentration camp: the anguish and loneliness, the barbed wires, the sad procession of women walking perhaps to the gas chambers, but also her prayers that helped her survive the horror, as well as the hope of freedom and a new life.Wikipedia