In an interview (in the catalogue for her 1974 exhibition 'Ghisha Koenig Sculpture 1968-74' at the Bedford House Gallery, London) the sculptor recalled being told by a tutor at Hornsey School of Art. 'There are no women sculptors'. Despite this discouragement, and the interruption of her training by the Second World War, Koenig began to study again in 1946 at Chelsea School of Art under Henry Moore and then at the Slade. Koenig's father was an art critic and writer and her mother an actor, and they numbered among their Jewish artist friends David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Jankel Adler and Josef Herman.
Koenig's sculptures were usually high relief, in bronze or terracotta, and often represented the factory workers she observed in Kent. Her work was realist, and also expressionist. She wanted to capture the psychological atmosphere of the workplace, and the small differences between the workers, whom she did not see as anonymous cogs in the machine. Politics lay behind her choice of subject matter, a modern reworking of the peasant themes of Courbet, Millet and van Gogh, fuelled by her belief that, as she put it in the 1974 interview. "Most human beings have very little choice in our society'. Koenig showed with the left-wing antifascist Artists Internationa] Association, where art on industrial themes was exhibited in the early 1940s. She won a commission for the Festival of Britain, and for a new housing scheme in Poplar, East London. She was one of the group of artists tackling similar themes during this post-war period who were exhibited in The Forgotten Fifties at the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield in 1984.
Koenig's work was shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery's Jewish Artists in England - i6s6-igs6 in 1956. She was singled out by the Times critic, along with fellow exhibitor Lily Delissa Joseph, as little-known artists whose work compared well with that of their more celebrated contemporaries. Koenig also showed with the Society of Portrait Sculptors and had solo exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery (1966) and the Serpentine Gallery (1986). A memorial exhibition was held at the Boundary Gallery in 1994. Koenig's drawings were shown with those of Henry Moore and Hamo Thomeycroft at the exhibition Work and the Image, held at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds in 1998. |
