Hanna Orzechowska. W relacji / In relation

Hanna Orzechowska. In Relation
22 September – 18 November 2023
Arton Foundation
Curators: Luiza Nader, Marika Kuźmicz
Cooperation: Adam Parol

Special thanks to:
Agata Siecińska
and
the participants in the Women’s Museum Laboratory 2022/23
(Maja Cieślak, Helena Dondé, macieja el, Barbara Kupiec, Tola Mielnik, Amina Olszewska, Natalia Popławska, Zuzanna Sikorska, Maria Sobczak, Łukaszka Staszkiewicz, Natalia Zawadzka)

Hanna Orzechowska (1923–2008) created unique drawings, paintings, textiles, collages, and intermedia installations from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s. She studied at what is now the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź (diplomas in the Faculty of Interior Design, 1951, and the Faculty of Textiles, 1953) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Faculty of Painting, 1953–1955). She was an outstanding designer and instructor, working at the Industrial Design Institute in Warsaw (1955–1958) and teaching at the Faculty of Textiles at the art academy in Łódź (1957–1976). In 1979 her Warsaw studio was robbed and torched. Most of the works there were destroyed, and those that survived show fire damage.
The exhibition we have prepared is the first individual show of the artist’s works since 1970. It focuses on the issue of relations, in the sense of bonds, interdependence, mutual impact, interaction with the surroundings and the world. We are also interested in “relations” in other senses: reports of events, experiences, and even routes, lines of communication, roads. Relations filled with love, friendship, acquaintance, mindfulness, care; relations formed with another person in a situation of openness, support. Orzechowska’s oeuvre is an intensive relation with art history and her immediate circle of friends—Łódź artists in the second half of the 1940s (such as Judyta Sobel, Halina Olszewska and Władysław Strzemiński). All of this makes up one of the key areas of Orzechowska’s artistic practice. In this context, travel, expedition, flight—in dizzying directions—are also vital. The exhibition presents drawings and collages addressing bonds with people near and far, with weaker and stronger individuals, and connections with the history of art embodied by Strzemiński’s Theory of Seeing; movement, travelling across time and space. We point to moments when Orzechowska transgressed seeing, understanding and experiencing of herself, others and the world, finding in the material of collages her own artistic idiom for expressing the past, the present and the future.