Alexandra Obarzanek

Grandfather’s Tale

1982

Alexandra Obarzanek was born in Bailystok Poland at the end of the war in 1945. She grew up in Communistic Poland until the age of 13 and immigrated with her mother to Melbourne in 1958 where she attended Elwood high school. She immigrated to Israel just after the six-day war in 1967 and lived and worked on Kibbutz Gal-On until 1974 when she returned to Melbourne. Back in Melbourne she enrolled to RMIT completing a BA in fine arts followed by a Masters in painting. Obarzanek exhibited commercially in the eighties. Prone to periods of depression, she struggled with her painting and the isolation it entailed she incorporated ceramics in her practice as a social and craft activity, which later in her career became a dominant art form of her practice. The WWII shaped Obarzanek’s life and the outcome of the holocaust in Eastern Europe was the sole driver for her to immigrate to Australia. Obarzanek’s creativity and struggles were directly influenced by the dominant past and to a great extent, her art was a way to make sense of things that could not be reconciled.