Fayga Perla Ostrower (Née Krakowski)

Place: Łódź

Born: 1920

Death: 2001

Biography:

Fayga Perla Ostrower (née Krakowski; 14 September 1920, Łódź — 13 September 2001, Rio de Janeiro) was a Polish-Brazilian engraver, painter, designer, illustrator, art theorist and university professor. She fled to Brazil in 1934 with her family to escape persecution from the Nazis. Ostrower began taking free art classes in 1939 at the Sociedade Brasileira de Belas in Rio de Janeiro. In 1941, she married fellow Polish émigré Heinz Ostrower and enrolled in graphic arts courses at the Fundação Getulio Vargas, where she studied wood engraving with Axl Leskoschek and metal engraving with Carlos Oswald and Tomás Santa Rosa. She earned several commissions to execute book illustrations (in linoleum cut), and her reputation grew within Brazil. Her work became increasingly abstract in the 1950s, and in 1955 she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to New York. During this time, she studied graphic arts at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and at Atelier 17 before its closure in September 1955. Ostrower also had a solo show of her etchings, aquatints, and woodcuts at The Contemporaries, held May 9 to 28, 1955. After returning to Brazil, Ostrower continued to show her work widely within Latin America, the United States, and Europe.