The History of Polish Artistic Textiles

falowiec-zach-flesz.jpg, default, Julita Wójcik, 'Falowiec', 2005 - 2006, photo: Zachęta - National Gallery of Art, The History of Polish Artistic Textiles

#photography & visual arts

If we ventured into the warehouses of public museums, we would come across dozens of artistic textiles gathered during the communist era. Textile experiments were carried out by constructivist avant-gardists as well as art deco artists, and for a moment, second-rate imitators of Magdalena Abakanowicz were emerging in masses on the wave of her international career.

The golden period of this medium took place in the 1960s, but the textile boom lasted well into the 1970s, followed by a rapid fall. Today, textile's status is similar to that of the printmaking technique – an almost dead technique, whose status along with other equivalent means of expression is usually only appreciated within the walls of conservative academies. For some artists, however, it is sometimes temporarily resurrected and even becomes one of their fundamental tools.

Modern folk

Zakopane's artistic legend is primarily associated with the local bohemia of the early 20th century centred around Witkacy, but Zakopane is also the cradle of outstanding educators. The Antoni Kenar Complex of Art Schools was established in the 1870s, originally as a woodcarving school for future folk woodworkers. Its first reformer was Karol Stryjeński in the inter-war period, who instilled the ideals of modern sculpture in Podhale boys carving religious figures, provoking the blossoming of an unusual phenomenon: local craft traditions blended harmoniously with cubist sculptural forms. Stryjeński's spiritual heir became Antoni Kenar, who managed to maintain this creative balance at the school until the end of the 1950s.

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Tadeusz Brzozowski and Maria Bujakowa, ‘Biegacze (Bieg)’ (Runners), 1956, embroidery and broaching on canvas, 310 x 190 cm, photo: Museum of Sport and Tourism in Warsaw

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Its pillar was Tadeusz Brzozowski, with whom it actively cooperated. One of the most adroit results of this collaboration is Olifant– an almost abstract composition, in which Bujakowa used textile to the fullest in an extraordinary way, presenting a multitude of dazzling technical solutions. The cooperation began when Bujakowa executed three textiles – currently in the collection of the Museum of Sport and Tourism in Warsaw – designed by Brzozowski for a competition (design for textile to be marketed during the Games) organized under the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956.

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Wojciech Sadley, 'Gobelin Olimpijski' (Olympic Tapestry), 1975, photo courtesy of the Museum of Sport and Tourism in Warsaw

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Wojciech Sadley – one of the most innovative artists using textiles, who also partook in the olympic competition – most often implemented his works by painting on silk. He started parallel to Bujakowa and Brzozowski, but his most impressive – also in terms of size – work, The Tapestry of the Olympic Games, was created two decades later. Sadley transferred formal solutions from other media to textile – as Ewa Tatar wrote, 'the types of pixelation are evidence of inspiration stemming from the printmaking techniques and press graphics of that time'.

Władysław Hasior, Ikona barokowa (Baroque Icon), before1968, assamblage, from the collection of Regional Museum in Nowy Sącz — Władysław Hasior, ‘Baroque Icon’, pre-1968, assemblage, from the collection of the District Museum in Nowy Sącz

During this same time, Władysław Hasior – who transformed his textile banners into assemblages full of found objects – also represented a different approach to Podhale's folk tradition. In a somewhat surreal form, the culture of small towns – during the period of Gierek proto-capitalism – is reflected in them: tawdry mass products and the latest achievements in electronics. At the same time, Hasior's banners are marked with a sacred aura and are carried around in processions in villages near Zakopane, like banners in church processions.

Disownment & domestication

In the 1960s and 1970s, textile became Magdalena Abakanowicz's gateway to fame. Thanks to the abstract, spatial 'Abakans,' she won the prestigious Fabrics Biennial in Lausanne. However, after many years, the artist disowned this stage of her career, emphasizing her identity as a sculptress. She said:

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Abakans brought me world fame, but they burdened me like a sin to which one can never admit. Because practising weaving closes the door to the art world.

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Magdalena Abakanowicz, 'Red Abakan', 1969, photo: EFE/MG/Forum

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For artists attached to textile art, this was like being stabbed in the back, but also from the perspective of the achievements of Abakanowicz, this can be considered a rather unfortunate attitude. As Karolina Plinta assessed:

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For [...] similar reasons, she also distanced herself from feminism and carefully emphasized the universal values hidden in her works – which, of course, was paradoxical because Abakanowicz's new, refreshing work was read as feminist. [...] However, this feminist appreciation took place after some time, and Abakanowicz herself decided to give up working with textiles in the 1970s – to be a sculptor only, not a weaver.

However, in the case of Abakanowicz, cutting herself off from textile was a dead-end choice, not only from the perspective of reception, but also in terms of creative development. While her textile, abstract Abakans stand up to comparison with the work of artists such as the pioneer of post-minimalism Eva Hesse, her later, full of air human figures, sculpted using jute bags and resin, as well as the most traditional sculptural materials – sculpture and stone – today stink of mothballs and offend with pathos. So much so that the creators of the 'Raster' Gallery, rewriting the canon of contemporary Polish art at the turn of the 1990s and 00s, gave them the nickname 'Formalin'.

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Maria Pinińska-Bereś, 'Erotic Sleeping Bag', 1974, photo press material of the Labyrinth Gallery

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Maria Pinińska-Bereś, "Becik erotyczny", 1974, fot. materiały prasowe Galerii Labirynt

On the basis of similar criteria, the Raster progressives referred to the works of Jerzy Bereś – who, in turn, liked the overly macho-esque romantic iconography – without favour and with irony. Maria Pinińska-Bereś built her achievements in conspicuous opposition to this image. She, unlike Abakanowicz, did not escape into more 'masculine' associations, but instead deliberately had attributes that played up 'femininity' – using pink, textiles, and home related motifs. There was an attempt to move the Abakans beyond the category of textile art, calling them 'soft sculptures'. Meanwhile, for some works by Pinińska-Bereś, this term fits almost effortlessly. 'My Charming Little Room' is, for example, made in the artist's characteristic technique of sewing soft small sponges onto a canvas, a small boudoir revealing pink, all with a girlish-erotic tinge.

Pinińska-Bereś also referred to the marginalized position of women in her performances, using similarly subtle tools. These, however, constituted a broader objection, and not only towards the implementations of her husband. The artist, associated with Kraków's avant-garde, participated in the spectacular actions of Tadeusz Kantor. You can say that the action 'Kite-Letter' is a later reference to Letter from 1967. In it, the giant envelope was replaced by a kite; the crowded procession by the artist performing alone; and the march through the city centre, to a march through the fields around the Prądnik River. When the kite pulled by the artist rose into the air, the spectators were able to see the words 'I am sorry, that I was, that I am'.

Embroideresses on the ruins of modernity

Thumbnail — Paulina Ołowska, 'Oksza', 2014, tapestry, photo. Jerry Birchfield / MOCA Cleveland / courtesy of Metro Pictures

Contemporary female artists – who are familiar with Pinińska-Bereś's contrarian attitude – approach tapestries, arras, and other textiles rather ironically. For example, installations by Alicja Bielawska, often using fabric, are minimal structures referring to the aesthetics of modernism. Despite the minimalism, they are not cold, in their own way familiar, domesticated, even 'cozy'.

Julita Wójcik domesticated the modernist heritage in an even more emphatic manner. Often reaching for 'home' techniques and situations, the Tri-City artist in 2005-2006 crocheted a small model of Gdańsk's 'falowiec' – one of the most successful, but overwhelming due to its scale, examples of a socmodernist residential construction. Through embroidery, she in a way domesticated it, turning it into a trinket, transforming it into a kind of 'knick-knack' perfect for placing onto a hutch common in the communist regime.

Paulina Ołowska approached textiles in a slightly more abstract and poetic way. In 2014, she made the tapestry Oksza for the exhibition Włułe muz at the Tatra Museum. Its title refers to the name of the museum's branch in which the exhibition was held, one of the villas in the Zakopane style, designed by the creator of this style – Stanisław Witkiewicz. The heavy, rather monumental tapestry reminiscent of works straight from the Biennale of Fabric in Lausanne from decades ago is a kind of commemoration to the outgrown era of the former industrial splendour of cities, which after the political transformation were pushed to the position of depopulated provinces. This tapestry, reeking of the 1970s, was, however, not made from fabric, but from plastic waste collected at the Nitrogen Plant in Tarnów.

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Franciszek Orłowski, 'Wiatrołap’ (2013. View from the exhibition 'The Splendour of Textiles’), 2013, Zachęta, Warsaw, photo: Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

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Textiles can also serve as a tool for socially engaged art. Franciszek Orłowski, spiritual heir to the critical art of the 1990s, became famous, amongst other things, for a performance in which he exchanged his clothes with the homeless. He continued this motif in a work prepared for the exhibition The Splendour of Textiles at Zachęta. The curtain placed at the entrance – through which visitors had to break through to go further, to see mostly historical as well as purely decorative textiles and which really had very little in common with the titled splendour – to the exhibition was sewn together from the clothes of homeless people.

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Monika Drożyńska, from the series 'Ćwiczenia' (Exercises), photo: courtesy of the artist

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For Monika Drożyńska, embroidery became a tool for formulating socio-political declarations and also declaring civic or purely personal frustrations. At times, they consist of tapestries decorated with floral ornaments, ironically referring to those that schoolgirls used to sew as part of their 'education', aesthetically exposed on the walls of a gallery's white cubes. At other times, as the artist says, acts of vandalism, such as appeals calling for participation in the Black Protest, embroidered on the backs of armchairs in a train wagon. As Drożyńska once said in an interview:

It somehow lowers my blood pressure, to unload my anger and frustrations in embroidery, and on the other hand, I'm enjoying what I'm doing. Like every other person, I have different disorders I have to deal with, and embroidery is the healthiest of all my compulsive behaviours.

Translated by Agnes Dudek from Polish.

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