From The Series 15% Of Abstraction

artists: Hanna Krzetuska, Wanda Gołkowska, Krzesława Maliszewska, Justyna Baśnik, Anna Kołodziejczyk, Karina Marusińska, Agnieszka Sejud, Karolina Szymanowska

Exhibition at the Mieszkanie Gepperta gallery and Szewska gallery dedicated to Hanna Krzetuska and the artists of the Grupa Wrocławska.

The exhibition It’s Me Who Paints! is a continuation of Art Transparent Foundation’s activities aimed to introduce the life and work of Hanna Krzetuska to the general public – not only as an interesting painter who made bold formal choices, but also as a driving force behind the post-war artistic and cultural community of Wrocław, which eventually led to the formation of the so-called Wrocław School or Group. This time, in keeping with the herstorical current, we are going to remember two other important members of the Group alongside Krzetuska: Wanda Gołkowska and Krzesława Maliszewska.

The works and attitudes of the artists of the older generation will be interpreted by younger women artists living and working in Wrocław today: Justyna Baśnik, Karolina Szymanowska, Karina Marusińska, Agnieszka Sejud and Anna Kołodziejczyk. In doing so, we will find out whether there is an awareness of, and need for, generational continuity in the local visual arts community. Apart from the obvious links with predecessors, resulting from education at the local academy of fine arts, is there any deeper, more conscious affinity built on ideas, attitudes or formal solutions? Was the informal character of the Group, which had no structured programme and was largely built on a sense of camaraderie between radically different artistic personalities, sufficient to lay the foundations for artistic continuity? It seems that looking from a contemporary feminist perspective and restoring previously underrepresented herstories may bring some surprising answers. Perhaps it will turn out that continuity lies in the worldview rather than programme? In the detail rather than manifesto? Perhaps the growing interest in filling in the gaps in the narrative about the not-so-distant past by recalling female narrators and heroines rather than their male colleagues, over-present as commentators and protagonists, is the fullest expression of the need for continuity? Let us return to Hanna Krzetuska in this context – not as the wife of Professor Eugeniusz Geppert, the first post-war rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, as the masculinised discourse has it, but as a courageous artist, an abstractionist who made radical choices against the views of her husband and part of the then milieu. Because if you seek, you may also err – but these will be your own errors. Isn’t it a manifesto and attitude most worthy of following?

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 

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