Vanguards, Revolutionaries, Feminists: Polish Sculptresses of the 19th & 20th Centuries

alina szapocznikow prace 2_4921395.jpg, small, Alina Szapocznikow, 'Dessert III', 1971, colour polyester, porcelain vase, 18 x 24 x 25 cm. From the collection of Piotr Stanisławski, photo by Roland

#photography & visual arts

Once they stood on the front-line of formal and moral revolution. They critically commented on the realities of the people’s democracy and of wild transformation. They were marginalised and neglected in the male dominated environment. Today, they comment on the remains of modern utopias and contemporary social reality. Let us present the most prominent Polish sculptresses of the past one hundred years.

Katarzyna Kobro

Born in Moscow at the end of the last decade of the 19th century, Katarzyna Kobro is the godmother of the Polish avant-garde. Underestimated for many years, she gained well-deserved recognition only in the 1990s. In 1988, Muzeum Sztuki (Museum of Art) in Łódź, founded several decades earlier thanks mostly to the donation made by Kobro and other members of the A.R. avant-garde group, organised a retrospective exhibition of her works.

During World War I Kobro worked as a sister of mercy in a Moscow hospital. There she met Władysław Strzemiński, who had been wounded on the front line. It’s thanks to her that Strzemiński, today famous as a painter and art theoretician, developed an interest in art and entered the orbit of Russian constructivist avant-garde. He was fascinated with the sculptures of young Kobro and compared her works to those of the suprematists, pointing out, however, that she by no means imitated them. In 1920 they got married and started to work and write theoretical texts as a team. Both of them also wrote individually, with shared revolutionary enthusiasm.

Selected works by Katarzyna Kobro – Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

Kobro completely rejects anecdote and metaphor. A sculpture is not meant to narrate. It should shape the space – it’s the proper building block of space. Likewise, planes, but also the free space between them, and the movement, which is indispensable in experiencing sculpture, for Kobro they are all important elements of sculpture. Kobro’s sculptures are composed of straight and wavy-bent horizontal and vertical planes, usually made of metal and wood. She also creates compositions of sheet metal and glass – none of them has survived. In her Rzeźby abstrakcyjne [Abstract Sculptures], Kobro emphasises colour, and in Kompozycje przestrzenne [Spatial Compsitions] she uses white, black, red, blue, and yellow.

Few of Kobro’s sculptures have survived – they are in the form of cardboard maquettes and sculptural sketches for sheet metal compositions, which are much more expensive to produce. Some of her wooden works end up in the stove, used as fuel to heat the apartment where she lives with her daughter. History shuffles Kobro and Strzemiński from place to place – from Smolensk, via Riga to Łódź. They quarrell and finally divorce. Kobro is given the custody of their daughter Nika. Caught in the poverty trap, Kobro sculpts small, non-durable models, and she makes sketches. Her last works are figurative, sensuous and melancholic Nudes, and also landscape drawings. She dies in 1951 of cancer.

Alina Szapocznikow

Alina Szapocznikow was born in the mid1920s. As she begins to flower into womanhood, WWII breaks out. She spends early years of Nazi occupation in the Pabianice ghetto, and then the Łódź ghetto, to finally find herself in the concentration camps of Bergen-Belsen and Teresin. It still remains unknown in which camp her war-induced wandering comes to an end, but the most significant date in the artist’s juvenile life is 1947, the year when she sets out from Prague for Paris. In Paris she continues her studies in sculpture, began in the Czech capital. She also meets artists representing the Nouveau Realisme movement. In 1951 she returns to Poland with Ryszard Stanisławski, an art historian and critic whom she’s met in Paris and who later becomes the director of Muzeum Sztuki [Museum of Art], and her first husband.

Back in Poland, she creates a number of works after the conventions of social realism. For Szapocznikow, this convention is not a constricting corset, but an artistic challenge. She was one of those artists who remembered the horrors of WWII and for whom the new system brought hope for a more just social order; alas, the reality turned out very different from what she herself and the French leftists had expected.

She invites soldiers to pose as models for her Polish-Russian friendship monument, placed in the Palace of Culture and Science, which was subsequently removed, despite its artistic value, in the early 1990s, as part of the 'decommunization' process. In the mid-1950s, Szapocznikow creates among others Trudny wiek [Difficult Age] and Pierwsza miłość [First Love]. They represent a smooth transition from social realism to her later works, which focus on corporeality and accentuate the emotional states which accompany adolescence. These sculptures can also be seen as a portrait of a certain epoch. Bodies of young girls are stressed and their proportions are expressively distorted.

Alina Szapocznikow – works [gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

Corporeality is of utmost importance for Szapocznikow in her later works. The artist uses casts of body parts. Next to traditional sculpture materials, such as bronze, she uses polyurethane of various colours - nude, pinkish, red, and dark purple as clotted blood. In the coming years, she delves into two dimensions of corporeality. On the one hand, the artist transforms lips into lampshades, emphasising pure sensuality, and bringing it to the level of fetish. On the other hand, affected by cancer, she creates sculptures featuring decay and exploring an alien force that consumes the human body. She ‘preserves’ herself and her son Piotr by making casts of her and his body, part by part, and embedding photographs in sculptural material. In 1972, she begins working on a series entitled Zielnik [Herbarium]. She collects casts of her son’s body like dried plants. She manages to make fourteen such casts. She dies in the same year.

Alina Ślesińska

The artistic career of Alina Ślesińska, who is a few years older than Szapocznikow, develops rapidly, only to fade gradually in subsequent years. Slesińska is a natural rival of Szapocznikow. In the male-dominated art world of the second half of the twentieth century, there is little room for women. Both sculptresses are of a similar age, their image is attractive for the media, they have the same first name, and thus some less well-informed journalists confuse the two. Both cultivate their media image, pose to press photographers in their studios and at art shows. Both fit into a model of a new woman – independent, self-confident, and successful. Like the British op-artist Bridget Riley, they pose willingly for photographs with their art works in the background, clearly dressed not in work clothes but in line with the latest trends.

Ślesińska also visits the capital of France; upon her return, she styles her hair and dresses á la Brigitte Bardot. She is featured on the cover of Zwierciadło [The Mirror] monthly. In London, she studies with Henry Moore, who is the most pronounced influence on her sculptures. As one of the ‘cultural export goods’ of the Polish People’s Republic, she has commissions not only in Poland but also abroad.

She competes with Szapocznikow in an artistic arms race. In the 1960s, Ślesińska triumphs in that race. Szapocznikow creates a prestigious Pomnik przyjaźni polsko-radzieckiej [Polish-Russian Friendship Monument] in the Palace of Culture, while later Ślesińska gets commissions a couple of years later in South America and in Africa. Oscar Niemeyer invites her to work for Brasilia – the new capital of Brazil, an ideal modernist town designed from scratch on the plan likened to a flying bird. There, her impressive, 12 meters high monument entitled Macierzyństwo [Motherhood] is to be erected. However, it never comes to fruition. She manages to complete Pomnik prezydenta Nkrumaha [Statute of the President Nkrumah] in Winneba, Ghana. However, the sculpture of black and white marble lasts just for one year from its completion.

Soon after WWII, Ślesińska participates in the rebuilding of Warsaw. She creates architectural sculptures, including for the façade of the Branicki Palace. In the mid-1950s, her sculptures become realistic, even naturalistic. During the period of ‘thaw’, they are more relaxed and the influence of Henry Moore is clear. The figures created by Ślesińska become more simplified, elongated, spatial. Yet, while Szapocznikow increasingly focuses on human body, Ślesińska abandons it. She turns towards architecture, designs sculptures for public spaces and makes models of buildings. She creates a plaster model of a town on water. She lets her imagination run wilder than Niemayer who has invited her to Brasilia. But unlike Niemayer, she lacks the means to make her visions come true. She is not an architect and her ideas are as daring as than those of Zofia and Oskar Hansen.

Lady luck deserts her. She moves to London but soon finds herself back in Poland. In 1970s, she has fewer and fewer exhibitions. Art critics begin to look at her works sceptically. Privately, she divorces her husband, the theatre critic Konstanty Puzyna, her health deteriorates, and she faces financial problems. She can only afford to sculpt in plaster. She also has no means to take care of the models and vast majority of them deteriorate. Some of her drawings, increasingly futuristic architectural visions, are preserved. She dies in the 1990s, forgotten. She will be remembered by the art world only in 2007 thanks to the exhibition organised by Ewa Toniak in Zachęta Gallery.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Born in 1930, Magdalena Abakanowicz studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, in mid 1950s - still in the era of Stalin. She started with painting, soon to abandon it for sculpture. To be more precise, for something on the verge of sculpture and artistic textile. Her so-called Abakans, which she began to create in the early 1960s, blur the border between the two fields of art.

Textile, which celebrated triumphs in the 1960s, is a marginal medium today. Although some contemporary artists broaden its understanding and attempt to restore its popularity, textile is still mainly associated with fusty exhibits, languishing in museum storerooms, and dating back to the mid 20th century. Abakanowicz is the first one to broaden the understanding of this medium. She does not treat textiles as flat surfaces. Fascinated with texture and the possibilities of combining it with colour, Abakanowicz creates very expressive works. Her organic, baroquely intense Abakans shown at the São Paulo Biennale in 1965 mark the beginning of her international career.

Abakanowicz? Abakanowicz! in Warsaw – Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

Abakans are being created over the years in numerous variants. Likewise, the artist reverts to themes that she has taken up earlier. In Embrilogia [Embryology], she uses cocoon-like, soft forms made out of jute fabric. However, she does not shy away from more monumental, expressive forms. In Gry wojenne [War Games], dating back to the late 1990s, she uses bare tree trunks with the bark removed, and hugged by steel hoops and rags. Starting in early 1970s, a human figure appears in Abakanowicz’s works, recurring in many forms, alternately with abstract, organic shapes.

The artist is not interested in an individual but in a group of people, a crowd. That is the title of her most famous figurative series Tłumy [The Crowds]. In tightly squeezed groups, humanoid figures stand straight, strained, in identical poses. They are rescaled and faceless. These are the most explicit among the artist's works, although from a formal perspective they are dangerously close to pompous kitsch. They invoke a universal metaphor, but doubtlessly also reflect the reality of the PRL. In spite of this, Abakanowicz became one of the Polish ‘export products’ and her criticism of the People’s Republic of Poland passed virtually unnoticed.

Over the following decades, Abakanowicz also creates works in public space. Particularly worthy of notice are her sculptures that depart from the metaphoric pathos, are more humorous – zoomorphic Mutanty [Mutants] and fairy-tale Rycerze króla Artura [Knights of King Arthur].

Barbara Falender

Barbara Falender was born in Wrocław, shortly after the end of WW2. She studied sculpture at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in early 1970s, in the studio of Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, one of the most outstanding Polish sculptors and pedagogues on the second half of the 20th century. Studies with Jarnuszkiewicz became a valuable experience for Falander, but in her works no direct impact can be found from the teacher who moved from social realism to figurative sculptures under the influence of Henry Moore, and subsequently to expressive sculptures, verging on abstraction and figuration, and finally to harmonious para-architectonic structures.

Falander creates her first sculpture when she is still a music school student. Influenced by the cult of Chopin, overwhelmingly present there, she sculpts the head of the great composer in clay. However, her diploma project completed in 1972 proves contrary to this approach. Out of plaster, Falender makes figures of Ludzie z Krakowskiego Przedmieścia [People from Krakowskie Przedmieście Street]. These are ordinary passers-by going past the gate of the Academy of Fine Arts. Their bodies are painted black, their clothes remain white. The figures are dressed in contemporary clothes and they have fashionable hairstyles. Some of them stand freely with their hands in trouser pockets, other are captured in movement. It’s like street photography translated into the sculptural medium. However, the majority of figures do not stand directly on the floor but are arranged on a wooden platform. Under the platform, there lie their dead counterparts. This work echoes the events that took place in March 1968 – a sociological observation is intertwined with political commentary.

For young Falender, the art of Alina Szapocznikow is a major point of reference. The influence of Abakanowicz is visible in Falender’s sensual sculptures from the 1970s, of which Poduszki erotyczne [Erotic Pillows] are most famous. They look almost abstract, but they also lure with erotic suggestiveness. Some of these pillows, cut by Falender in marble, are softly shaped and polished, resembling sensual compositions by classic modern sculptors, such as Bernini. In other pillows the artist experiments, like Szapocznikow, with plastics – epoxide resin, for example.

Soon she starts to combine materials, such as marble and metal, using their formal properties to bring out the sensual tension of the compositions. In those days, plainly erotic art pieces may have been shocking. Falender makes erotic sculptures secretly, holed up in the countryside, at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. The vaginal and phallic forms shown at the Academy cause an outrage. Later on, eroticism begins to interweave with the passing of human life.

When Szapocznikow dies, Falender creates her Hommage dla Aliny Szapocznikow [Hommage to Alina Szapocznikow], a woman figure covered with a shroud. When her mother dies, Falender sculpts Mémoire – the first but not the last of her works dedicated to the memory of her parents. Next to classical themes, the artist also tackles classical forms, reaching towards antiquity. In the 1990s, she alludes to classical sculptures, but hers are worn away, damaged. The iconographic motifs form a contrast with the delicate, fragile material – Falender starts to make porcelain sculptures. At the same time, she is sculpting in wood, using a power saw to cut wooden blocks. In wooden sculptures she also emphasises transience – more sarcophagi are created, this time from wood. Also in her new projects, death and sensuality interwine.

Maria Pinińska-Bereś

Some female artists, such as Katarzyna Kobro, work in tandem with their partners, also artists, while others create independently, and in a very different manner that their companions. Maria Pinińska-Bereś is born in 1931, in Poznań. She studies under the supervision of the legendary Xawery Dunikowski at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. One can say that from the very beginning she must deal with the bloated ego of male artists. Dunikowski has such an ego. One year after finishing her studies, in 1957, Maria marries Jerzy Bereś. The couple moves in the circle of Tadeusz Kantor, whose egocentricity and misogyny are sufficient for a whole herd of artists.

The husband of Pnińska-Bereś, a legend of Polish performative art, emanates with romantic imagery in his works. When he is burning torches, carving totemic wooden figures, and exposing his nude body, emaciated and far from the canons of male beauty, she seems to be mocking him. She counters his machismo with ironic oversweetness and infantilisation, hers in fact is a critical voice against the status of women in the male-dominated milieus. She experienced this problem herself as a child, in her family home, under the watchful eye of her grandfather and in the company of her brothers, favoured by him. She creates her first pink sculpture in the same year that she marries Bereś. Unlike her husband’s sculptures, which are made of harsh materials and are rigid in form, hers are made of soft fabric and quickly become dominated by shades of pink.

Maria Pinińska-Bereś - works [gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

In the 1960s, the metaphoric corset imposed on women by the society around her appears in her works quite literally. The artist is no less literally hampered by another corset – maternity. While her husband is making a glittering career, she spends time raising their daughter Bettina, who will also become an artist. And time flies. The fact that a woman must stay young and beautiful just to be noticed is reflected in one Maria’s most powerful works, titled Czy kobieta jest człowiekiem? [Is a Woman a Human Being?]. Here, the corset is replaced by a white swimming suit, covered with numerous lipstick marks and with a label attached saying: Production date ….. Expiry date…. ? …... The whole piece is placed in a wooden box, calling to mind a coffin.

The series titled Psychomebelki [Psycho-Furniture] and Mój uroczy pokoik [My Charming Little Room] comments on the fact that women are compelled to play the role of the housewife. Pinińska is also involved in performative art. When martial law is imposed, she has problems in exhibiting her works. The artist community boycotts official, state institutions. Exhibitions are organised in church premises. Her works do not fit there. She exhibits more after the transformation. Even though she distances herself somewhat from the feminist discourse, she is invited to exhibitions and discussions where her ground-breaking role is appreciated.

Teresa Murak

Born in late 1940s in Lubelszczyzna, Teresa Murak completed her studies in the painting studios of Jan Tarasin and Tadeusz Dominik, at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. She made her debut while still being a student, showing Zasiew [Crop] of germinating cress seeds in the famous Dziekanka – a gallery linked to the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. From the very beginning, she is involved in the process and organic art, permeated however with metaphysics.

Because of the materials she uses, Murak is associated with the landart movement, which has never been as popular in Poland as in the United States for example. However, she lacked means or space to create such spectacular installations as did American artists in Nevada deserts, using heavy equipment to this end. Murak is much more intimate. Apart from cress, she uses river silt, and even dust. She mixes earth art with body art and grows cress on her own nude body – she lies in a bathtub full of cress seeds until they germinate. On another occasion, she makes a dress out of cress.

Teresa Murak - works [gallery]

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

The spiritual trace in Murak’s art pieces brings to mind more primal, simple rituals, while also being directly associated with the sacrum, especially with Catholic folk rituals. In 1983, in one of her ‘next-to-a-church exhibitions’ she plants a crest on the arms of a cross. At an exhibition at Zachęta Gallery, in 2016, she covers the arms of a cross with lumps of coal. She makes religious references also in the very titles of her works, such as Procesja [Procession] of 1974 or Dywan wielkanocny [Easter Carpet], which were created in the same year. In her home village of Kiełczewice, a piece of fabric overgrown with cress is carried to local church and then floated down the river.

Apart from the religious dimension and the fascination with the life cycle of nature, Murak’s works also have a political undertone. The text: Wielkanoc '81 [Easter’81] is sown on a beach at the time of the ‘Solidarity carnival’. It symbolises not only the blooming nature in spring, but also the hope for a political change.

Małgorzata Malinowska

Born in the late 1950s in Sopot, Małgorzata Malinowska is initially connected with her home, the Tricity. She studies at the Gdańsk Acadamy of Fine Arts. She paints. She graduates in 1986, and eight years later abandons painting. The following year she starts her collaboration with Marek Kijewski in an artistic duo. He uses his own name, she – a nickname Kocur [Tomcat].

Kijewski, who studied under Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, forms together with Mirosław Bałka and Mirosław Filonik an artistic group called Neue Bieremiennost [New Awarness]. Initially, he follows the new expressionist trend. Later on, his works become more placid, contemplative, mystical. Also, the artworks of Malinowska/Kocur show some existential threads, however spiced with irony – typical for the new expressionist art.

In a duo, Kijewski and Kocur turn to the present, to visual culture and to the social realities of the time of transformation. Their art pieces glitter with bright colours and are adorned with feathers and fur. Art critics perceive them as a Polish version of pop art. Sculptures created by Kijewski/Kocur blend mysticism with pain and pleasure. A sitting figure of a saint made of lego blocks with a neon nimbus over his head resembles a convict on an electric chair. The neon Saint Sebastian is pinned with knives to the wall, like in a circus trick. Some sculptures resemble religious totems and at the same time they look like toys from a sex shop. As Jakub Banasiak comments:

‘[…] various 'spiritual' motives in their work should be seen in perspective of the new age pauperisation of the sacrum and of the 1990s plastic sacro-polo rather than as actual mystical elevation, typical of Kijowski’s art from the 1980s. After all, we’ve shut sulphur in the box – now the time has come for love and sweets.’

Even though the duo’s work is probably the most formally interesting and exceptionally witty commentary on the time of transformation, it is lost in art history in place of the younger generation of critical artists, with some of whom Kijewski/Kocur make friends and collaborate, for example during Orońsko open-air event Bifurkacje, in 2007. In the same year, the duo’s cooperation comes to an end – Kijewski dies. A few years later, in 2015 their collaborative works are recalled during the Warsaw Gallery Weekend at Propaganda Gallery.

Joanna Rajkowska

Joanna Rajkowska in front of her ‘Dotleniacz’/The Oxygenator/, photo: Wojciech Druszcz/Reporter

Born in 1968, at the turn of 1980s and 1990s, Joanna Rajkowska, completes her studies in art history at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Almost at the same time, she graduates with a master’s degree in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. However, her art has little in common with the art of Jerzy Nowosielski, her teacher. In the 1990s, Rajkowska sculpts hybrid figures in epoxy resin. She uses a cast of her own body, as well as casts of dead animals. She treats the body as a sculpture. In 2000, this relation is taken to a totally new level. She creates a compelling fiction: soaps, perfumes and drinks allegedly based on her own body ('Satisfaction guaranteed'). The artist produces them on an industrial scale and for the first time attracts considerable attention. She puts intimate photos on the packaging. She also promises that her products will have incredible effects.

However, the central place in Rajkowska’s artistic output is occupied by her projects in public space. The first and best-known is the famous palm tree at the Rondo de Gaulle’a (Charles de Gaulle roundabout) in Warsaw – Pozdrowienia z Alej Jerozolimskich/Greetings from the Jerusalem Avenue. The artificial date palm, associated with the avenue’s name, was created after the artist’s visit to Israel. The palm calls to mind the void left by the once large Warsaw Jewish community, whose past existence is reflected today mainly in the names, almost void and functioning out of their original context. The installation was to stand at the Charles de Gaulle roundabout for one year. However, it was left there for good, becoming one of the symbols of the city. The palm attracts not only TV cameras and tourists who take pictures in front of it, including a selfie which is a must, but it also provokes others to act. In 2016, for example, a young artist, Renata Motyka, in her Take Care video performance, was running to the artificial palm tree and watering it.

Water is central in another of Rajkowska’s projects placed in the public spaces of Warsaw, entitled Dotleniacz/The Oxygenator, that attracted much attention. At the Plac Grzybowski [Grzybowski Square], the artist arranged a pond with a special ozonating device, placed underwater. The device created fog over the pond. Special chairs were placed around the pond so that people could sit and spend time together. However, unlike the Greetings from the Jerusalem Avenue, the Oxygenator, though enthusiastically welcomed by Varsovians, did not stay long.

In another landmark of the capital, the Plac Konstytucji [Constitution Square], Rajkowska installs a much more discreet and personal work. In the car park where the artist’s family home once stood, destroyed during the Second World War, she sets up a copy of a dentist spittoon from her great-grandfather’s dental clinic. The potentially most spectacular project of Rajkowska, entitled Minaret, was proposed in 2009. The artist planned to transform the chimney of a pre-war, out-of-use paper factory on Estkowskiego Street in Poznań into the eponymous minaret. Based on a logic similar to that of the Warsaw palm tree, the project was highly controversial, and was never completed.

Maria Loboda

Maria Loboda comes from Kraków. She was brought up in Germany where she studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Currently she works in Berlin and in London, and she teaches in Zurich. Loboda’s sculptures are characterised by specific, oniric allure, always with an element of understatement. At one time, the artist cast a long desk from plaster, at another she covered the desk with black leather on which there was a visible trace of an unidentified object that had been removed. The work is titled Zadania Porzucone Przed Zakończeniem [Tasks Abandoned Before Completion]. Her other work is a huge circle made of grain stalks and set up vertically in the centre of the gallery. This work is accompanied by several small compositions, including a sculpture in the form of a cigarette stuck in a jar of face cream.

Her pieces also abound in references to ancient Greek or Egyptian mythology – elements evoking the antique style are combined with contemporary ones, providing a poetic commentary (far from a simple judgment) on the present-day bourgeois imaginarium. During the dOCUMENTA 13 exhibition in Kassel in 2012, Loboda created a work entitled 'This Work is Dedicated to an Emperor'. It was an installation consisting of 20 cypress trees, moving through the garden like the forest in Macbeth.

Maria Loboda Solo Exhibition: I am Radiant, I am Radiant, I am Radiant in My Defeat – Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

In Poland, Loboda has created some very discreet works. In 2014, in a mountain chalet in the Polish Five Lakes Valley, she makes Day for Night – a delicate stained glass with geometric figures cast in white glass through which one can look at the Tatra landscape. Loboda’s geometric composition alludes to the modernist vision of Zakopane and to its myth, the creation of which has not been fully successful. A year later, she puts semi-precious stones into the façade of Bunkier Sztuki in Kraków, thereby alluding to the legend of the Emir of the Alhambra, who sunk some valuables in the fortress walls, and they could only be discovered after the fortress was demolished.

Monika Sosnowska

Born in 1972, Monika Sosnowska is still painting when she studies in Poznań. As time goes by, she gradually moves from flat surface paintings towards three-dimensional works. In 2000, she graduates from the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. At this time, she creates a piece entitled Dodatkowe Oświetlenie [Additional Illumination]. She puts lamps on the roof of the Rijksakademie; during the longest day of the year these lamps 'support' the Sun with their light from the sunrise to the sunset.

A year later, she comes down to earth – at U-jazdwoski [Centre for Contemporary Art] she shows a work entitled Mała Alicja [Little Alice]. Referring to Alice in Wonderland and the shrinking heroine, Sosnowska designs a row of rooms, each one opening to the next, and each one smaller than the previous one. The last one is a real miniature. In this joke, there is an element of weirdness and Kafka-like oppression. In her later works, there is little humour, but oppression in abundance. At the 2003 Venice Biennale, Sosnowska presents a corridor, somewhat resembling the piece she showed at the Ujazdowski Castle. The corridor is painted green and is rapidly shrinking, although, thanks to a playful optical illusion, it seems very long. In another corridor, presented at Art Basel, the space is divided by an absurdly large number of doors, placed one behind the other, which once again creates an oppressive situation.

Sosnowska takes architectural elements and transforms them, crushes them, strips them of their shells, leaving deformed skeletons. This is sociomodernism in ruins, an unfulfilled utopia. At another Venice Biennale, in 2007, she placed a 1:1 skeleton of a modernist pavilion made of reinforced concrete into the Polish pavilion. The structure filled the entire space, but it was squashed, deformed, resembling clothes forcibly packed into an overstuffed wardrobe. The skeleton was inspired by the pavilion at Górskiego Street in Warsaw, where the Foksal Gallery Foundation, the artist’s home gallery, is located. The very building of Foksal Gallery Foundation houses one of Sosnowska’s more discreet works – a bent rung of a banister, picturesquely twisting in space, stretched out like chewing gum. Sosnowska has also made some works in public space, including Kula [Sphere] in the Bródno Sculpture Park and several versions of Schody [Stairs] – a monumental, squashed, spiral staircase leading nowhere. As Stach Szabłowski wrote about her recent works:

What is this strange universe of deformed spaces, constructions, skeletons, and concrete, strange objects made of reinforcing bars? This world fits into the mould of ruin poetics (modernism), yet it lacks the sentimentalism typical of this poetics and the picturesque mess characteristic of ruins. Here, decay – and its efflorescence – are precisely, mathematically planned.

Iza Tarasewicz

Iza Tarasewicz studied in Poznań. She was one of the founders of the Penerstwo group, once associated with Poznań. However, over the years her works became calmer and more minimalistic. Tarasewicz’s early sculptures are characterised by an immense load of expression. The artist experiments with materials, foremost, biological ones – animal skin, intestines, flesh (she studied medicine in the past). The material used is sometimes 'inconsistent' with what the work presents – for example, a wolf is made out of pig’s flesh.

A formal breakthrough happens in Georgia, where Tarasewicz resides for a few months in 2011. Later, at the Clinamen exhibition in the Królikarnia Palace, different materials dominate – tar, ash, glass, plaster, concrete. Yet, animal intestines, and even excrements, make their comeback. Tarasewicz includes in the exhibition also some objects connected with the place and drawn out of non-existence, kept in museum storerooms, yet never displayed, such as carving tools that belonged to Xawery Dunikowski.

Materiality begins to play the first fiddle, the objects are no longer merely the materials out of which art works are made; rather, they become heroes of the works, in the spirit of object-oriented ontology, or more broadly, speculative realism. The objects are fully-fledged actors, not merely a vehicle to convey emotions of the artist. In 2015, in Zachęta Gallery, at the exhibition in one of the editions of Spojrzenia [Views] competition, Tarasewicz presents her installation Turba, Turbo. This simple yet effective structure is inspired by the shape of a modernist flower stand, full of shelves filled with organic forms, but it is also associated with the hadron collider in the CERN laboratory. In this installation, the spectrum of problems that interest the artist is picturesquely stretched from the level of elementary particles, through small elements of nature, to a piece of furniture with a retro-futuristic touch. This is probably the most brilliant work in the spirit of the new materialism in Polish art.

Selected Works by Iza Tarasewicz - Image Gallery

Embeded gallery style

display gallery as slider

Translated from Polish by Magdalena Fortecka

Language English

polish sculpture

polish artists

polish female artists