Agatha Wojciechowsky

1896 - 1986

  • Andrus, 1953, pencil, charcoal on paper, 35 x 28 cm
  • untitled, 1953, pencil on paper, 35 x 28 cm
  • untitled, pencil on paper, 35 x 28 cm
  • untitled, 1953, pencil on paper, 34,3 x 24,9 cm
  • untitled, 1969, pencil on paper, 30 x 23 cm
  • untitled, 1954, crayon, pencil on paper, 30,2 x 22 cm
  • untitled, 1952, pencil on paper, 30,2 x 22,5 cm
  • untitled, 1960, pencil on paper, 30 x 23 cm
  • untitled, 1953, pencil on paper, 30 x 22,5 cm
  • untitled, 1965, pen and ink drawing on paper, 19 x 12,4 cm
  • untitled, pencil on paper, 30,5 x 23 cm
  • untitled, pen and ink drawing on paper, 35 x 28 cm
  • untitled, pen and ink drawing on paper, 14 x 19,8 cm
  • untitled, pen and ink drawing on paper, 30 x 22,5 cm
  • untitled, 1953, pencil on paper, 25,3 x 19,8 cm

Agatha Wojchiechowsky was born in 1896, in Steinach (Germany). According to her own statements, she had her first visions at age four. In 1923, she emigrated to the United States and earned her living as a house maid, seamstress, laundry woman, and kitchen help in various hotels. She married and had two children. When „Mona,“ the American Indian girl, appeared to her, she began drawing what Mona told her to draw. „Take a small pencil, place it on a sheet of paper and watch what happens, immediately it, and I, began to draw and we drew and drew for a long time“. This is how Agatha Wojchiechowsky described the beginning of her artistic activity. After World War II, she worked as a medium, gained high prominence and performed healing. From 1951 numerous drawings and watercolors materialize, which she mostly executed with closed eyes and always in contact with invisible powers. She worked with charcoal, ink, or pen. Her works are mediators between the worlds. Time and again, abstract forms and graphical signs as well as numerous ghost-like faces emerge which fill the entire sheet of paper. They appear like phantasms, dark, wraithlike, mysteriously intertwined and let the viewer discover this other world. In her closed state, they almost appear meditative and resting in themselves. In 1961, she received the priesthood of the Universal Spiritist Association of the United States. She made numerous expansive journeys around the world before she settled in New York, where she had her first solo exhibitions in Gallery Cordier and Ekström in the 1960s. Her works were also exhibited at Galerie Zwirner in Cologne, Galerie Springer in Berlin, and in various exhibitions of L´Art Brut. Her paintings and drawing are in the Museum of Modern Art New York, in the Larry Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield (Connecticut), and in the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as in some museums and private collections in Europe and the United States. Agatha Wojchiechowsky died in 1986 in the United States.