These are not puzzles that can be adjusted with the aim of achieving a coherent picture. Square column pillars are covered with glued photographs of the artist's apartment-cum-studio. An old door and jamb leads into the space. A plaque on the door reads: "H. Stażewski". Between the pillars hangs Stażewski's picture. The artist, the doyen of European avant-garde, is holding a mirror. Is he playing a joke on us by reflecting sunlight into our faces, or does he want us to see our reflection in the glass? Or maybe it is Krasiński, the author of the installation, trying to look into the memory of his friend.
The friendship between Henryk Stażewski and Edward Krasiński was special: the two artists lived under the same roof for two decades. They were two artistic personalities seemingly at opposite poles of the avant-garde spectrum. The apartment on the top floor of Aleja Swierczewski, later renamed Al. Solidarności (Solidarity Boulevard), a drab-gray communist block near Old Town in Warsaw, is one of the most important places in Poland's avant-garde art history. (It is now home to the Avant-Garde Institute (Instytut Awangardy), a museum, exhibition and archive space.) Stażewski lived there from the early 1960s, originally with the painter Maria Ewa Łunkiewicz-Rogoyska and her husband. Miron Białoszewski visited Stażewski there and wrote ("Me. And He."):
Skyscraper. Eleventh floor. Key? I do not use elevators. I did not manage to hitch a ride. I decide to walk. It's embarrassing to climb so many stairs in today's world. (...) I stop for breathers on the landings - because of my shortness of breath. The heart beats faster. The city descends until it drops. Kind of like a bomb. (...) They are not in. A neighbour caught me. They went to the city. He said he knew.
Krasiński moved into a small room there at the beginning of the following decade.
The Stażewski apartment-studio became a special spot on the artistic map of Warsaw. Friends and artists went there every day at five o'clock. They conducted discussions about art and philosophy. Krasiński did not always participate in the meetings, and he created his own special spots on the map. He was sociable but always lived in his own universe. The apartment-studio, however, was the essential element of that universe.
When Stażewski died in 1988, an era ended. Krasiński was left alone in a large apartment cleared of Stażewski's images that had previously filled the living-room wall. Stażewski is remembered in a photograph in which he poses in a gown with colourful stripes against a wall of his own images that are just as vibrant.
Who was Henryk Stażewski? - Krasiński asked after the death of his friend - he was Henio ... I loved him and that's it.
The only remaining artefacts of Stażewski's in the studio were dusty traces of paintings on the walls and the wires on which they had hung.
In 1989, Krasiński, made a remarkable tribute to his dear friend at the Foksal Gallery Foundation / Galerii Foksal, the gallery they opened together in 1966. One could say that the gallery and the studio constituted their lives. The exhibition, "In Memory of Henryk Stażewski", was the artist's studio transferred to the gallery. To this end, Krasiński used photographs and mock furniture. Anka Ptaszkowska wrote:
In a way known only to himself, eloquently reducing an already-small gallery space, Krasiński reconstructed the studio space (...) Appealing to the memory and provoking a constant oscillation between the reality of the physical, mental and emotional, he performed linear operations in time and space; the exhibition became the studio and the gallery no longer the gallery. The public space and private space of art and life have become one.
The oppositions observed by Ptaszkowska shed light both on Krasiński's work, and on the lives of the two artists. Life in art? Living art?
Since then, the studio has become an important reference point to many of Krasiński's works, but also a place of his artistic activities, a kind of laboratory. After the exhibition at the Foksal Gallery, the furniture-dummies arrived and stood next to the originals. Soon the apartment on the top floor of the block was filled with numerous works by Krasiński, turning it into a Gesamtkunstwerk inside a communist-era residential block. Glasses of vodka resembling drops of congealed blood is actually red paint. Grey mice run in different directions. From the floor a small tree arises on which the artist's visitors stumbled. In the studio, works from other exhibitions were placed, plus copies of historical pictures, and ping-pong (which Krasiński played with Stefan Szydłowski).
As the process continued, the space returned with great intensity as if the artist was tormented by opposing forces: on the one hand, an unstoppable need to change, on the other, a desire to retain a memory of the overall picture as it disintegrated into pieces of the puzzle.
In the 1990s, the studio was subject to constant reinterpretation due to Krasiński's efforts. However, the idea of a kind of 'transfer' of space, which can be found in photography, did not leave him.
In 1994, at the Foksal Gallery, he made another attempt to arrest time with Atelier (puzzle), while also playing a game with the audience. The pillars, which are elements of puzzle pieces, represent the two sides of photography. On the black side, Krasiński stuck blue tape, revealing his "bonding" power. The blue line like a horizon, that binds the world, allows the artist to cover the accompanying reality. The laboratory is broken into fragments; to see it you have to make a special effort.
Author: Karol Sienkiewicz, December 2009 .
- Edward Krasiński
Atelier (puzzle)
1994
Foksal Gallery in Warsaw
