The exhibition “It’s Me Who Paints!” can be viewed in the Mieszkanie Gepperta Gallery in Wrocław (run by the Transparent Art Foundation). The show is organized as part of the “15% of Abstraction” series that aims to foster the relations between former and current female artists shaping the art scene in Wrocław. Kuba Żary speaks with Michał Bieniek and Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz, the project curators.
K. Z.: “It’s Me Who Paints!” is the 4th edition of the series “15% of Abstraction” that brings together legendary female artists of the Wrocław art scene and its modern-day participants. What was the driving force behind the initiation of this project?
Michał Bieniek: The series originates directly from the location of our foundation and gallery in the former apartment of Eugeniusz Geppert and Hanna Krzetuska. For years, it had been a meeting point of local artists in Wrocław that saw the creation of Grupa Wrocławska, an influential post-war group of artists. After the death of residents, the apartment was used an unofficial museum – filled with memorabilia, notes, and dried flowers. You could only call and make an appointment for a private tour. This disorganized, chaotically displayed collection was gifted to the museum by the Academy of Fine Arts and the Municipal Museum in the mid-2000s. When our Art Transparent Foundation was approached with a proposal to manage this place in 2017, we decided to let young artists inside again.
Mieszkanie Gepperta was established as a gallery dedicated to new phenomena on the visual arts scene in Wrocław. However, the longer we stayed in this space, the stronger we felt the need to investigate and get closer to the figures who had been creating it for decades, showing them in different, modern contexts. Hence, the idea to confront their art with messages conveyed by young and middle-generation artists. Initially, we juxtaposed the works of Hanna Krzetuska against those of Karolina Szymanowska in 2018. The title “15% of Abstraction” was inspired by the book by Krzetuska, a mixture of autobiography and art manifesto. The most fascinating section deals with the artist’s transition from figurative into abstract practice in the 1960s. It was a radical gesture in her professional and personal life since her husband had been making public statements about this decision, finding it unconventional, strange, crazy even. Still, after dozens of years of upholding the principles of the Krakow school of figurative art, Krzetuska decided to take this bold step in Wrocław. This step speaks volumes and is an excellent point of departure for our project.
K. Z.: Was your initiative revolving around the figure and artistic approach of Krzetuska in any way inspired by less attention devoted to her than her famous husband? Is your project an attempt at levelling the playing field, so to speak, between the gallery’s patrons – the man-artist and woman-artist?
Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz: It’s a significant and organic process. Methodologies and language are evolving – today, we speak more of women artists than we did in the past. We are also discussing why woman artists were largely overlooked before and why it was so evident that Mieszkanie Gepperta should be named after him and not be called after the Gepperts or Geppert and Krzetuska. The point is not an equal positioning, even more so because in my opinion, Krzetuska was a much better painter than Geppert, so let’s not talk about equals here, please [laughs]. The point is a recollection of her and other female painters who belonged to Grupa Wrocławska. It’s about a specific situation of local pairs of artists: Jan Chwałczyk and Wanda Gołkowska or Alfons Mazurkiewicz and Krzesława Maliszewska.
Another critical cognitive and methodological shift we’re striving for is the reflection on a local context. We deliberately invite female artists from Wrocław to participate in a dialogue between artists from an older and younger generations. This emphasis on Wrocław is far from meaningless because we care about inferring the importance of locality in the foundation and operations of Grupa Wrocławska and the emergence of a commonly shared thought. We look towards the past to see what locality might mean for the present.
K. Z.: The series opened with the artworks by Hanna Krzetuska; today you’re returning to her figure to build around her a narrative of a much broader scope. What was the concept behind this exhibit? What is the story you are telling through the show?
MB: It’s a show in the vein of herstory. Apart from Krzetuska, we’re also focusing on the aforementioned Gołkowska and Maliszewska – the first is a prominent artist in the local art circle, and the latter is less known and might come as a pretty big surprise. Maliszewska’s practice is ambiguous, political and worth interpreting and examining from many different angles. We decided to build the show around three different names – all these female artists were not only part of Grupa Wrocławska but also a starting point for looking at a bigger picture and not just applying a “one on one” formula.
Of the younger artists, we invited to participate in the exhibition, was Karolina Szymanowska. We started collaborating in 2018, delving deeper into the practice of Krzetuska. She has a fascinating approach to this artist as a person with a very peculiar relationship with the world. Karolina was engaged profoundly and emotionally in the project, made lots of preparations beforehand, and devoted a lot of time to research and attempts at understanding Krzetuska. A year ago, my invitation was enthusiastically accepted by Anna Kołodziejczyk, who also specializes in abstract geometry. It was important for her to analyse the path of Krzetuska, who decided to make abstract art later in her life. The exhibition also features the painting by Justyna Baśnik – a straightforward portrait of the artist in her characteristic daring strokes.
MM: Karina Marusińska reinterprets the art practice of Wanda Gołkowska, who focuses mainly on geometry and straight lines. Only in some of her late works does the line seem to slip by her. And that is precisely the state that Karina intended to capture – this transient moment – with the use of minimalist clay forms shaped manually so that they contain traces of materiality and corporeality. Finally, we have Agnieszka Sejud, who painted a self-portrait referring to an enigmatic practice of Krzesława Maliszewska.
K. Z.: Did any forms of conducting a dialogue with the artists from the past come to you as a surprise?
MM: Most participating artists work in mediums other than painting, so it was interesting to see how they went beyond their usual forms of expression. What surprised me were the artists’ profoundly emotional responses, especially their engagement and how deeply they were moved by the stories they heard and artworks they were unfamiliar with.
MB: That’s true, the artists certainly derived a certain satisfaction from this situation. It was important for them; they wanted to spend their time and energy exploring these relations. Therefore it seems to me that some of the displayed works are incredibly tender in terms of texture and spatial presence. They are far from imposing and yet simultaneously present and aware.
MM: It coincided perfectly with our intention to loosen up the curatorial circumstance and offer artists a chance to select the subject and pieces out of an available set to which they felt most drawn. A dialogue, stimulating conversation with young artists, is precious and significant. Discussion on the accompanying forum shed light on many issues which have been present for about six decades, and remain very much relevant. Building a bridge across three generations allows you to re-evaluate the art of the part and extract brand-new meanings.
K. Z.: An essay accompanying the exhibition raises the question about awareness and the need for continued practices across generations of local visual artists from Wrocław. Did you manage to find an answer during preparations?
MB: This need does exist, to some extent unconsciously. Projects such as “15% of Abstraction” are the form of a simulation – our role as curators is to instigate a meeting and making a pitch to the artists: “Listen, there is this and that person that makes this kind of art. Perhaps we could do something with it?”. The art community originating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław is still vividly aware of the need to form a connection with local members of different generations. Obviously, there are artists whose works refer to the pieces of their predecessors, even though they don’t know them personally or didn’t attend classes in their studio governed by the master-apprentice relation. However, when it comes to the artist, who was never associated with these academic structures or were a part of them briefly, an external stimulus might trigger their interest in the area. It’s incredibly important.
MM: Artists participating in the “It’s Me Who Paints!” exhibition were familiar with the practice of an older generation to a varied degree. When I spoke with Aga Sejud, she admitted that she had never heard of Krzesława Maliszewska even though she studied at the art academy in Wrocław. Remembering certain figures, and rescuing them from obscurity is crucial – if only to highlight the importance of their work to contemporary artists walking a similar path. Returning to pieces that had exerted an immense influence on the local artistic identity occurs more and more frequently and stirs exponentially strong interest. Great examples could be the exhibition titled “The Germans Did Not Come” (2014) curated by Michał and “New Normativity. Wrocław ’70 Arts Symposium” (2020) curated by Piotr Lisowski, both held in MWW Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, as well as the entire grassroots project “Wrocław Symposium 70/20” centering around the history and identity of the city of Wrocław.
K. Z.: You also discussed many of these subjects during the forum organised a day after an opening as a sort of commentary to the exhibition.
MM: When we were discussing the activity of Grupa Wrocławska among ourselves, we often referred to interpersonal relations, anecdotes and word of mouth, so we came up with the idea to tell a more subjective and first-person narrative around these events. We invited Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska, Mira Żelechower-Aleksiun and Ewa Ludwińska-Chwałczyk to participate in our discussion – they weren’t mincing words while talking about the difficulties of operating in a men-dominated, patriarchal society. Younger artists were also offered an opportunity to share their observations on contemporary social, cultural and gender contexts influencing their practice.
MB: We’re dealing with subjectivity while using spoken accounts and stories. In the last debate moderated by Małgorzata, Anna Markowska, an art historian, stated that we will never know anything “for sure” if we listen to the anecdotes. Only a sum of some recollections can provide us with a broader and more credible account on individual artists and their mutual relations. That’s the reason why it’s so important to listen carefully to these stories. That’s the only way to learn the emotions behind paintings that were created several decades ago and now can gain a new life owing to these young artists.
[Co-financed by the Museum of Polish History in Warsaw as part of the “Patriotism of Tomorrow” programme. Co-financed by the Municipality of Wrocław. www.wroclaw.pl]
