Alicja and Bożena Wahl

Visual artists and twin sisters born in 1932. The Wahls studied painting in the atelier of Eugeniusz Eibisch, graduating in 1958, and made their debut with a joint exhibition at the Krzywe Koło Gallery in 1961. From 1979, they also presented their works at the Alicja and Bożena Wahl Art Gallery, one of the first private galleries under the communist regime in Poland.

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Alicja and Bożena Wahl, 1960s, photo: M. Tarasiewicz

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Although they made a name for themselves as draughtswomen and painters, Alicja and Bożena Wahl began their careers by experimenting with a range of media and taking on a variety of jobs. They regularly published drawings in Kultura magazine, designed book covers and illustrations – Alicja was the creator of, among other things, the graphic design for the first edition of Witkacy’s The 622 Downfalls of Bungo. They also designed sets for Kabaret Starszych Panów and Television Theatre, among others, and costumes for film productions.

Apart from a diploma in painting in the atelier of the colourist Eugeniusz Eibisch, the sisters also studied an additional specialisation in Wanda Golakowska’s ceramics studio (it is not certain, however, whether they passed the exam, especially since, according to reports, the artists did not really follow the lecturer’s recommendations). It was ceramics that the sisters presented at their joint debut exhibition at the Krzywe Koło Gallery in 1961. Raw forms with a rough, matt texture, in the colours of natural clay, betraying archaic inspirations, combined the forms of vessels with simplified human figures, as if taken alive from Neolithic rock art.

The ceramic episode was short-lived. For the next two decades, drawing and painting became the primary media of both artists. They were known primarily as draughtswomen, although both aspired to be painters from the start. In the 1980s, they moved almost entirely away from drawing, concentrating instead on painting. They created works individually, in separate studios, but in constant proximity and dialogue, using a similar formal language and motifs, and exhibited together on many occasions. Especially at the beginning of their careers, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the works of the two Wahl sisters remained, nomen omen, twinned.

The intertwining of the two artists’ work led commentators from the outset to look not so much for obvious commonalities as for subtle distinctions. Zygmunt Kałużyński wrote in 1962: ‘The dominant colour here is dark green, giving Alicja Wahl’s paintings a tonality of strained lyricism. Bożena Wahl, in turn, represents in this duet a counterpoint of anxiety, predation, satire [...].’

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Bożena Wahl, photo: Jacek Barcz/Forum

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Henryk Waniek, on the other hand, stated in 1979 that ‘Ms Alicja’s world is sharper, both in the legibility of the objects and the drabness of the representations. Ms Bożena [...] is closer to a lyrical tendency, and both the colour content and the avoidance of surprising metaphorical combinations mark her paintings with personal qualities’ – most likely, however, this was not a completely different interpretation of the sisters’ work, but rather a common mistake of confusing their names.

‘In essence, we paint for each other. She for me, I for her. And we just complement each other. Maybe we would like to become independent of each other, but I don’t think that’s possible anymore’, said Alicja in a conversation with Krystyna Nastulanka, published in Polityka in 1980. Dressed differently, though always with identical hairstyles, from the beginning they attracted the attention of the public and critics not only with their works themselves, but also with the skilfully cultivated image they created. Sisterly relationships are also a constantly recurring theme in the works of both artists.

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Alicja Wahl, photo: Michał Sadowski/Forum

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In their drawings from the 1960s and 1970s, the Wahl sisters created a specific imaginarium growing out of a surreal imagination in which exaggerated corporeality, sexuality and horror are tightly intertwined. In the 1960s, the figures, drawn in small strokes, underwent various mutations, sometimes becoming tangled masses of headless limbs, at other times taking semi-animal forms, blending into their dresses or furniture. In the following decade, the two artists’ lines became more delicate, with black and white increasingly giving way to colourful compositions with subtle tonal transitions between reds, pinks, purples, blues and greens. Grotesquely twisted faces, on the other hand, tend to become less and less human and more insect-like, or even mutating into monstrous growths.

The twisted figures enter into relationships that are difficult to define, marked simultaneously by sexual desire and unbridled brutality. The sisters’ drawings from the late 1960s and early 1970s can almost be viewed as though we were looking at the elaborate mating rituals of some unknown insect species, unsure whether copulation would seamlessly transition into the killing of one of the parties. At the same time, the grotesque formal language ensures that the sisters’ work does not fall into pathos.

Creating in close connection, observing and subjecting each other’s work to frank criticism, the Wahl sisters developed a distinctive, separate formal language early on, but their work was not completely self-absorbed. They created works inspired by literature, from Homer to Proust, but without illustrative literalism and they also reinterpreted certain classical iconographic motifs in their own way. The theme of the stages of a woman’s life, taken up by painters from Hans Baldung in the 16th century to symbolists such as Munch, depicting a row of female figures as in a textbook illustration of an evolutionary sequence, takes on a completely different form in Alicja Wahl’s work. Cztery Pory Życia (The Four Seasons of Life) is a representation of bodies with prominent breasts and skinny, spider-like legs, growing one from the other. They are somewhat reminiscent of a monstrous matryoshka doll, or perhaps even more so of a replicating insect or snake undergoing moulting and seeming to grow straight out of the ground.

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Alicja Wahl, ‘The Four Seasons of Life’, 1974, 80x70 cm, photo courtesy of the Alicja and Bożena Wahl Foundation

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Juxtaposed with classical approaches to the subject, Alicja Wahl’s Four Seasons of Life is striking not only for its extreme biological perspective, but also for its specific view of subjectivity. The individual stages of life are depicted not through separate figures, but by closely combining them into a single organism. The old body contains all the previous ones and, in addition, the order is somehow reversed – younger and younger incarnations emerge from the dying shells. The tensions between vitality and decay, psychological subtlety and grotesque exaggeration, characteristic of the two sisters’ work, are clearly visible here.

Alicja Wahl’s drawing dates from 1974 and was described as revolutionary by Kazimiera Szczuka in the context of feminist representation. In the same year, Ewa Partum created Zmiana (Change) and Natalia LL created one version of Consumer Art and Natalia ist Sex. The work of the Wahl sisters, for whom sexuality became one of the central themes in the 1970s, also opens up a wide field for feminist interpretations while completing the picture of feminist art of the time. While its canon is defined by the work of women neo-avant-garde artists, using media such as performance, photography and video, and referring primarily to the representation of femininity and the production of its norms in the public sphere, the Wahl sisters locate themselves in a completely different place. Reaching for the traditional media of drawing and painting, the artists, rooted in the surrealist tradition, take a leap into their own subconscious. Their works are closer to Louise Bourgeois than to the classics of Polish feminist art.

A turn in more individualistic directions occurred in the 1970s, but it was still not a stylistic split, merely a different distribution of accents. In Alicja’s works at the time, a wider and more saturated colour palette and a softer line can be seen, while Bożena’s works remained drawn with a sharper line and maintained in darker tones. A clearer separation of the two sisters’ artistic trajectories occurred in the 1980s, with the return of grimacing faces emerging from dark backgrounds in shades of grey, cold, broken blues, browns and black, reminiscent of Géricault’s studies of severed heads. Alicja, meanwhile, reaches for gouache and uses more saturated colours, above all intense reds. The outlines of bodies and faces remain similarly indistinct and jittery as in Bożena’s, but the iconography is different. The artist paints nude bodies – pale female bodies and dark, even black and ghostly male bodies – entwined in an embrace. As in the drawings of the 1970s, however, it is difficult to tell whether we are looking at scenes of pleasure or, on the contrary, brutal sexual violence.

In 1979, in her house on Mierosławskiego Street in Warsaw’s Żoliborz district, Alicja Wahl founded a private gallery, which operated until 2002. Although its name featured both sisters, the gallery remained Alicja’s initiative from the outset and belonged to the group of the first Polish commercial galleries, which did not find it easy to survive on the market at the end of the Gierek decade. Under the conditions of a centrally controlled economy, it was difficult to speak of an art market in today’s terms – the foundations of one did not begin to emerge until after the economic reform of 1986 – prices were set by artists in agreement with the state-owned monopolist Desa, and on top of that, the gallerist charged not the now standard 50 percent, but only 15 percent on sales. The gallery’s programme outline was determined primarily by surrealist tendencies, evident in the art of the sisters themselves. In her gallery, Alicja Wahl presented and sold works by, among others, Jan Lebenstein, Jan Dobkowski, Teresa Pągowska, Zdzisław Beksiński or Jerzy Stajuda. It also hosted non-commercial exhibitions – such as the famous Witkacy show. In Alicja’s house-gallery, the two twins also regularly presented their own work.

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Bożena Wahl, ‘Untitled’, 1965, 70x100 cm, photo courtesy of the Alicja and Bożena Wahl Foundation

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During the period of transformation, with the change not only in terms of generation, but above all in terms of aesthetic paradigms, the arrival on the scene of so-called critical art and a new kind of painting under the banner of the Ładnie group, the Wahl sisters, like many other figures important to Polish art in the second half of the 20th century, virtually disappeared from the critical horizon. Monika Małkowska still wrote about Alicja’s work, and magazines such as Zwierciadło or Sukces published occasional short interviews with the artists, but there was less and less room for them in the reorganising art field of the time.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Bożena Wahl became involved in caring for homeless animals. As she reported in 1991, she began to sell her pastels to the general public – flowers, landscapes, spiders – once a month on the streets of Warsaw’s Old Town, despite being in a difficult financial situation, thereby financing the care of animals.

In 2021, the achievements of the artists were recalled by the Arton Foundation and the Lokal_30 gallery with a joint exhibition entitled Sisters: Alicja and Bożena Wahl, opening up the field for a reinterpretation of their work. Alicja Wahl died in 2020 in Konstancin-Jeziorna. Bożena Wahl ran a dog shelter in Boguszyce near Rawa Mazowiecka in her final years and she died in March 2025. The legacy of the artists is cared for by the Alicja and Bożena Wahl Foundation.

abstract painting

women in contemporary art

polish expressionism