In 1993 together with Tomasz Augustyniak, Jakub Czekaj, Ludmiła Kaźmierska and Mirosław Rekowski she co-founded the Start design group. Works of the members were exhibited under the title Start – Grupa Projektantów Wzornictwa (editor’s note: Start – Group of Industrial Designers). The exposition was shown in 1994 in Warsaw's Institute of Industrial Design and, subsequently, in a couple of Poland's biggest cities: in the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Kraków and in Galeria Dizajn BWA in Wrocław. Before that, together with Tomasz Augustyniak and Ewa Krakowska she had co-created one of the first interior design galleries in Poznań and Poland. The gallery was called Odgłosy and it sold objects which combined furniture and sculpture.
After graduation Dorota Koziara received a grant from the Stefan Batory Foundation and another from the Minister of Culture and Art, as well as the Maria Dokowicz grant for best diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. The three awards enabled her to study in Italy between 1995 and 1996. At that time, there were only two design schools in Milan, both private. Since the condition of the ministry was that the state's money had to be spent on studies at public and not private academies, she chose Rome.
During her stay in Rome, she had two main areas of interest. One of them was the revitalisation of historic churches in the centre of Rome related to the jubilee of the year 2000. One of Koziara's designs was the concept of the visual information telling tourists the history of places and works of art with no incursion into the atmosphere of the monument and it was chosen by the Ministry of Culture in Rome to be carried out. The second area of Koziara's interest was designing car interiors in cooperation with Research Fiat in Turin.
As Koziara said in an interview conducted by Dominik Lisik for the magazine 2+3D she chose Italy because of the diversity of stylistics and the high quality of the design criticism in many design magazines published there. During her stay in Rome Koziara met the star of Italian design, Alessandro Mendini, who was at that time the art director in many companies influencing design, such as Alessi, Abet Laminati, Bisazza, and many others. After becoming acquainted with Koziara's portfolio, Mendini offered her an internship in his studio. That is what the artist said about how she started working with him:
He invited me to his studio. I took my portfolio, although it was something new for me and it was one of my friends who said I should show Mendini what I do. It seemed to me that I shouldn't bother someone like Mendini with my works. After looking at my portfolio, he asked if I wanted to have an internship in his studio.
Koziara recalls that in 1997, when she was starting her internship in Milan, there was an immense gulf between Polish and Italian design. What was happening in the capital of Lombardy influenced the whole world, whereas Polish design was only about to recover from the crisis of the 80s and the 90s. Even despite this fact in almost every interview Koziara emphasised her respect for Polish academies and she praised their high quality education. When the three-month internship ended, the Mendini brothers offered Koziara permanent employment. In the collaboration with Alessandro Mendini Koziara designed, for example, the post-modern Alessi Shop Concept, characteristic of both the designer and the client. The concept has been applied in many different cities all over the world, starting with Tokyo (1998). Koziara also designed Grande Brindisi glass tureens for the company Venini from Murano, a place famous for the manufacture of glass.
In 1999 Koziara won an award at the Third Millennium international sculpture competition for the installation 12 Angeli, which used to be property of Franciacorta Sculpture Park in Italy and is now located in Tuscany. Earlier on, the installation had been shown at an exhibition organised by Sotheby's in London and at Salone del Mobile during the display Fuori Salone. That is what Koziara says about the work:
I think this is my most important work and it's very close to my heart because it was inspired by Rome, a magical city, and a moving song that my grandfather would listen to.
The success of this work and Koziara's undiminished artistic activity, chiefly sculpture and installation, let her open her own studio a year after starting her collaboration with the Mendini brothers. She decided to open it on the same street where the Atelier Mendini was located. She created her designs, sculptures, and installations there. In the following years, together with Alessandro Mendini and Yumiko Kobayashi, she made a 20 metre-high sculpture called Dino, which was placed in front of Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan. In 2016 the northern Italian region of the Fiemme Valley in the Dolomites mountain region invited Koziara to create a sculpture for the RespirArt art park. The artist made a sculptural installation there at 2300 metres above sea level and called it Harmony.
Apart from her artistic activity and designing objects, Koziara also designs scenography for theatres. In 1998 she created part of the dramaturgy and stage design for the performance 70 Angels on the Facade directed by Robert Wilson for Piccolo Teatro in Milan. It was the first ever theatre performance about the history of architecture and design, created for the 70th anniversary of Domus, the oldest design magazine in the world. Working on this performance involved not only cooperating with remarkable specialists, such as A. J. Weissbard (lighting) and Jacques Reynaud (costumes), but also getting to know all the details of the history of design, which required doing research in the archives of Domus and interviewing people related with the magazine. In the same year Koziara collaborated on the stage design for the performance The Days Before in the New York Lincoln Centre. It was also directed by Robert Wilson on the basis of Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before and Koziara's next sculptures were used in the performance.
At the end of her cooperation with Alessandro Mendini, Koziara organised a monographic exhibition of the Italian designer's works, which took place in 2004 in the National Museum in Poznań with the support of the Kulczyk Foundation. The exhibition was opened on the day Poland became a member of the European Union. When Wrocław was the European Capital of Culture in 2016, Koziara organised another exposition of Mendini's works there: in the Museum of Architecture and the Academy of Fine Arts. Also in 2016, Mendini became the curator of a monographic exhibition of Koziara's works in the the City Museum of Wrocław in Stary Ratusz. He showed her art and the designs created in collaboration with the industry: ceramics, glass, furniture and sculptures.
One of Koziara's most interesting designs are patterns for the ceramics produced in Bolesławiec, a city located in the Lower Silesia region, where ceramics have been produced since the Middle Ages. A special kind of clay can be found only there. Because of its location, historically the town had belonged to two countries. Regardless of the configuration of borders, the ceramic plants did not cease to work. Nowadays they manufacture dishes covered with brown glaze and objects which are stamp-ornamented by hand with characteristic small and cobalt blue, rarely multicoloured, patterns. Koziara referred to this tradition and created a series of patterns whose structure was similar to the traditional ones, but filtered through a modern sensibility. The result was a set of geometric ornaments which were combined together on one object or made it possible to create new sets consisting of different dishes. The patterns are hand-stamped with the use of the typical Bolesławiec method of decorating simple, traditional forms of mugs, cups, plates and bowls of different sizes. Koziara refers to traditional Polish craft in her collection of lamps made of wicker, titled Wind. She showed them for the first time at the exhibition in Sotheby's London on New Bond Street in 2000. In 2014 Koziara's designs were noticed by Christian Dior. To this day in Dior's collections are products from the series Wind of Salento designed by Dorota Koziara, especially the collections of objects made of glass designed exclusively for Dior.
Dorota Koziara is an extremely versatile designer. She does not avoid banal topics (e.g., the Paletta brooms for the Japanese company Nihon Shida Palm MFG. Co Ltd.), and at the same time feels comfortable working with luxury brands. She can also switch between designs with modest forms, such as the Pelagie tables for the Polish company Comforty, and large-scale projects of great artistic expression (the post-modern round shapes in the interiors of Byblos Art Villa Amista Hotel in Verona).
Dorota Koziara's work in design is greatly varied: she is a designer and at the same time she promotes this field of art, works on the strategy of company development, and is engaged in design criticism. Her most important exhibitions include Real Industry Future Classics Comforty in Temporary Museum For New Design Superstudio Piu, Mediolan Salone del Mobile 2011, Polish Design – Design from Wielkopolska, Salone del Mobile 2012, Polish Design, Salone del Mobile 2013, Downtown Design, Dubai 2013, Polish Design Tomorrow is Today at Salone del Mobile 2017 in Milan and the aforementioned exhibitions curated by Alessandro Mendini. Her works have been presented at various expositions in Poland and abroad, for example in Milan, London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Tokio and Zurich. International media consider her the ambassador of the Polish design worldwide.
Originally written in Polish by Agata Szydłowska, translated by MW, April 2018.