Dieser Katalog der Berliner Künstlerin Silvia Dzubas erscheint begleitend zu ihrer Ausstellung im Epigrafischen Museum Athen vom 8.März- 18.Mai 2020. Dzubas hat hier Elemente der griechischen, hebräischen und anderen Alphabete in ihre abstrakten Gemälde integriert.

Die Berliner Künstlerin Silvia Dzubas wurde 1946 in Berlin in eine Malerfamilie hineingeboren. Onkel und Großonkel waren in die Emigration gegangen, ihr Vater blieb in Deutschland, tauchte während des Nazionalsozialismus unter. Silvia Dzubas wuchs in Ostberlin auf, wurde als jüngstes Kind stark von beiden Seiten der Familienerlebnisse geprägt. 1968  Flucht aus der DDR über Prag, Wien  Westberlin 1972 Aufenthalt in Amerika New York , Boston Stanford und Besuch beim Onkel und bekannten Maler Friedel Dzubas. 1973 Rückkehr nach Deutschland, die Künstlerin pendelt zwischen Griechenland und Berlin. Zahlreiche Einzelausstellungen und Gruppenausstellungen.

Paintings of Silvia Dzubas remind us of the disappeared letters. Since childhood Silvia Dzubas was fascinated by letters. The English language has this wonderful double meaning for letter as a single character and at the same time as a written letter that combines many characters to sentences which you can write to somebody as a personal message. Dzubas felt very strongly how these letters from the distant past are trying to speak to her like personal mail. But these magical letters were on first sight secrets to her, she was fascinated by the shapes, by the unusual aesthetic forms. She felt attracted by the strange inscriptions, signs, symbols, ideograms on early stones or clay tablets, incised on stone or metal objects or written in cuttlefish ink (sepia), which recorded the knowledge and experience of the ancestors. She discovered in the Epigraphical Museum within the National Archaeological Museum of Athens in Greece the largest collection of inscriptions of its kind in the world. It comprises 14.000 funerary inscriptions, mostly Greek, mainly from Attica, but also some Hebrew. Chronologically, the inscriptions range from the eight century B.C., the age of Homer, to the Late Roman era. The contents of the inscriptions are honorary decrees, alliance treaties, calendars, economic accounts with first numerical signs or boundary stones for sanctuaries. She discovered, for example, the marble stele-boundary stone (horos) of the sanctuary of Demeter on Thasos, with inscription from the late 6th-early 5th century B.C.1 As she deciphered the Greek text: I am Demeter, I am a landmark DHMHTR OSEIMI TOKATO M. ELO, she had a strong feeling of being addressed directly in spite of thousands of years between the origin of this text and today. This was very touching for her. She decided to use her medium as a painter, to give this grey stones more color and to transfer the antique text and medium to her canvases using many layers. Finally the paintings look sometimes like reliefs. Demeter (Greek: Dimitir, Dimitra, Latin: Ceres) is the goddess of fertility, of the earth, of grain, seed and the seasons. The name contains the word mitir, méter= mother. The préfix De comes from the doric dá or gé (both for earth). The Mother of Earth was also called the mother of barley. Together with Zeus she has given birth to her daughter Persephone. But Hades, the god of the underworld, kidnapped Persephone. Demeter was so sad and angry about the loss of her daughter that she enacted a ban to all plants to grow, and forbade all animals to reproduce. Finally the gods of the Olympus forced a compromise, letting Persephone spend one part of the year with her husband in the underworld (winter) and the other part with her mother on earth (summer). This was the beginning of the seasons on earth. 1 Die griechische Schrift, Athen 2001, S. 61, Abb. 28.