Bożenna Biskupska

Visual artist, sculptor, painter, creator of installations and video works. Initiator of the International Culture Laboratory in Sokołowsko. Born in 1952 in Warsaw, Biskupska lives and works in Sokołowsko.

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Bożenna Biskupska, photo: Wojciech Rogowicz/National Museum in Wrocław

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Bożenna Biskupska was born into a family of photographers, but she herself began with painting, which she chose as her field of study. Between 1970 and 1972, she studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań (now the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of the Arts Poznań), and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where she graduated in 1976 in Tadeusz Dominik’s studio. Already during her studies, she reached for a variety of techniques and experimented with materials, using photography, textiles and sculpture in addition to painting.

Since the beginning of her work, Biskupska has dealt with grand, universal themes – man, time and transience are at the centre of her practice. In her early paintings and sculptures, the human figure acquires a summarised, simplified form, with time even transforming into a kind of repeated sign.

In the sculptures of the Trwanie (Persistence) series from the early 1980s, as important as the figures themselves, made of metal and sisal, is the organisation of space and the relationship between the work and its environment. The tension between sculpture and space is also accentuated in The Mystery of Time, presented in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1984. It comprises 32 figures resembling humans made of organic materials: tow, sawdust and sisal bonded with epoxy resin. Maintained on a scale slightly larger than natural, they affect the viewer passing inside the installation with their size and rhythm. The solid yet fragile materiality of the works directs attention to themes of the passage of time and transience. The figures themselves, as if frozen in cocoons, seem suspended between the moments of birth and death.

At the same time, Biskupska’s first sculptural works in bronze were also created, as well as paintings from the Współistnienie (Coexistence) series, maintained on a scale corresponding to human height, with simplified, expressive figures painted with multiple layers of paint. These early works were interpreted, among others, in the context of working through the tragedies of World War II and the Holocaust, juxtaposing them with the works of Alina Szapocznikow or Kazimierz Gustaw Zemla. As the artist herself recalled: ‘The odium of the World War II drama was still present. My generation grew up in such an atmosphere and it was difficult to break away from this sense of some kind of danger, of absolute anxiety.’

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Bożenna Biskupska, photo: Wojciech Rogowicz/National Museum in Wrocław

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In 1982, the figure of the ‘One-Legged Man’ appeared for the first time in Biskupska’s work in painted form, recurring over the following decades in drawings, oil paintings, cast bronze and concrete sculptures and installations. The multiplied figure resembling a deformed human always remains similar in outline, although individualised in detail, bringing to mind associations with Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Crowds or Wanda Czełkowska’s Heads.

At the end of the 1980s, Biskupska’s sculptures and paintings showed heightened expression, both in the outline of the forms and the expressive colours. Biskupska moved away from anthropomorphic figures to more abstract ones in her monolithic wooden sculptures, Płytowce, from the mid-1980s. At the same time, in the series Non Omnis Moriar, Biskupska again reached for organic materials – linen, dung, sawdust, hemp, combined with epoxy resin – introducing for the first time a distinct colour to her sculptures, in this case red, and combining different media in a single series – drawing became the starting point for her sculptural figures.

Biskupska’s subsequent work is difficult to divide into clearly separated stages. Successive projects are realised simultaneously, using different artistic means, as in the case of Demarcation of the Image, which began with works on paper in 1995. This is a key series in the artist’s oeuvre, showing the evolution from figure to sign, gesture recording, a trace left on the plane or in space, and from short closed cycles to multi-year and multi-layered projects involving various media and evolving formally.

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Bożenna Biskupska, 'Jednonogi', 2023, photo: the In Situ Contemporary Art Foundation archive

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The first works in the series are painted with white paint, and then with linseed oil alone, the standard medium used in oil painting. Here, the line, the basic gesture, is ‘freed’ from the figurative convention and becomes independent. Thanks to the unusual choice of technique, time also becomes an important factor in paintings executed in linseed oil alone. While it (and conditions such as lighting or air humidity) is usually a threat to works on paper, and conservation efforts aim to eliminate its detrimental effect on the work, Biskupska proposes a completely different approach. The minimalist compositions on paper and canvas, composed of arrangements of parallel lines, a record of the artist's simple gesture, do not actually have a closed form that can be preserved. Gradual change is inherent in their nature – the oil lines blend into the ground, lose their clarity, spill out into amorphous patches and turn yellow.

A similar role is played in Biskupska’s works by the multiplication of motifs. As Jerzy Madeyski wrote in the catalogue of the artist’s exhibition at the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in 1986: ‘the multiplication of any object in space has its own special meaning, evoking an impression of rhythm and thus a certain regularity or even truth of the phenomenon. Above all, multiplication evokes an impression of time, a sense of a certain continuity of a narrative nature.’

Demarcation of the Image 343 (1997-1998) is the first monumental sculptural installation in the series, consisting of 343 concrete slabs with a relief, repeated image of the One-Legged Man. The photographic sculpture Packing, in the form of seven rows of film enclosed in a metal cage, was in turn created from negative film with a photographic record of all 343 slabs made by Zygmunt Rytka. The same title is also borne by a video lasting several minutes, on which all the records were recorded. The artist thus experiments with forms of documentation, giving them the status of successive works, which also acquire a material, installation form.

In Demarcation of the Image 01 (1998-2002), bronze cast and multiplied small figures of the Unicorns, 24 or 25 per module – all similar but not identical – are attached to slabs of concrete and marble flour, forming a quasi-architectural modular structure. Cast one at a time, they accentuate the tension between individuality and uniformity, although from a distance they merge into a rhythmic pattern. As Bożena Kowalska wrote in Format magazine, in this form the work is associated ‘with a wall of weeping, a plaque commemorating the fallen or the murdered, or perhaps simply a symbolic reminder of all those who have passed away.’

The work was expanded upon, among others, in the video Zapis Idei (A Record of an Idea) from 2004, in which the individual panels that make up the wall of Demarcation of the Image 01 alternately emerge and disappear, finally revealing the entire collection and suggesting the possibility of its unlimited expansion. Moving between media using the same forms, the artist also emphasises the properties of specific materials, as in the case of the bronze casts made on the basis of texturally painted images. As Magdalena Wicherkiewicz wrote:

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Bożenna Biskupska’s art is characterised by two opposing but complementary tendencies: the materialisation and concretisation of ideas in a variety of matter (sculpture, painting, drawing, installation-object) and the parallel process of dematerialisation of form, the ‘disappearance’ of the permanent work-object, combined with a focus on process activities, often with the use of so-called new media.

In 2004, Biskupska founded the In Situ Contemporary Art Foundation together with Zygmunt Rytka, and three years later the International Culture Laboratory in Sokołowsko. Thanks to the efforts of Biskupska, Rytka and Zuzanna Fogtt, the former Görbersdorf resort with its Hermann Brehmer sanatorium became a thriving artistic centre, the venue for several festivals: the music-based Sanatorium Dźwięku, the performative Contexts International Festival of Ephemeral Art and the film festival Hommage à Kieślowski. During the revitalisation of the sanatorium building, Biskupska also realised a series of video works, Przeganianie Myśli (Chasing Away Thoughts), a kind of stream of consciousness merging with images of the then ruined sanatorium.

Selected solo exhibitions:

2024 – Bożenna Biskupska: The Artist and Possible Construction, The Four Domes Pavilion, a branch of the National Museum in Wrocław;
2024 – Śladem Jednonogiego (On the Trail of the One-Legged Man), Wallspace Gallery, Warsaw.
2019 – The Epitaphy of Time, L’etrangere Gallery, London, United Kingdom.
2012 – Światy Równoległe (Parallel Worlds), Książ Castle.
2010 – Menument, Łódź Municipal Art Gallery;
2010 – Przeganianie myśli. Po co (Chasing Away Thoughts: What For), Baltic Gallery of Contemporary Art, Słupsk.
2005 – W Drodze (On the Road), Jüdisches Museum Westfalen, Dorsten, Germany;
2005 – Wytyczanie Obrazu (Demarcation of the Image), Pomeranian Dukes' Castle, Szczecin.
2002 – Prace z Lat 1982–2002 (Works from the Years 1982-2002), Xawery Dunikowski Sculpture Museum, Królikarnia, Warsaw.
2001 – Upakowanie (Packing), Wschodnia Gallery, Łódź.
1999 – Wytyczanie Obrazu (Demarcation of the Image), BWA Wrocław.
1998 – Prace 1996–1998 (Works 1996-1998), Centre of Polish Sculpture, Orońsko.
1995 – Zależności (Dependencies), Manhattan Gallery, Łódź.
1989 – Malarstwo i Rzeźba (Painting and Sculpture), Im Turm Gallery, Berlin, Germany.
1988 – Malarstwo i Rzeźba (Painting and Sculpture), Muzeum Ziemi Lubuskiej, Zielona Góra.
1986 – Malarstwo i Rzeźba (Painting and Sculpture), Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw.
1978 – Pokaz Jednego Dzieła (Presentation of a single Work), Dom Artysty Plastyka, Warsaw.

Selected group exhibitions:

2023 – Seeing with the Body Studio Gallery Collection, OP ENHEIM, Wrocław.
2021 – 10th Sacrum Art Triennale ‘Holiness of Nature?’ , Municipal Art Gallery, Częstochowa.
2019 – New Look, National Museum in Gdańsk.
2015 – Open Collection, National Museum in Szczecin.
2014 – Photo-object, BWA Kielce.
2009 – Like a Rolling Stone, Centre of Polish Sculpture, Orońsko.
2008 – The Third Edition, Museum of Architecture, Wrocław.
2006 – New Tendencies in Polish Paintings, City Gallery BWA, Bydgoszcz.
2003 – Form and Colour, Forum+ Gallery, Chicago, USA.
2002 – Transcultural Visions 2: Polish-American Contemporary Art, Xawery Dunikowski Sculpture Museum, Królikarnia, Warsaw.
1995 – A Woman’s View, World Bank, Washington D.C., USA.
1986 – Human Life – Fate of the Earth, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw.
1984 – 41st Venice Biennale, Polish Pavilion, Venice, Italy.