exhibitions
Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror exhibition
Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror – exhibition curated by Marika Kuźmicz, president of the Arton Foundation
Organisers: Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław, Museum of Architecture in Wrocław
Exhibition at the Museum of Architecture, Bernardyńska 5, Wrocław
The monographic exhibition Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror is an attempt to look at the artist’s work as a process whose essential element was the construction of her own subjectivity and investigation of her relationship with the world.
Maria Michałowska actively co-created the Wrocław avant-garde milieu for over five decades. She participated in some of the most important, groundbreaking events for Polish art, including the Wrocław ’70 Visual Arts Symposium, the SP. Conceptual Art exhibition (1970), the International Meeting of Artists, Scientists and Art Theorists in Osieki (1967) or Atelier 72 in Edinburgh (1972). The subsequent phases of her work both set the tone for changes in the field of Wrocław art and resonated with them. Although claiming that her oeuvre still needs to be “discovered” would be an overstatement, it is true that she had only eleven solo exhibitions during her lifetime and no individual presentations in the last decade.
Michałowska used various media in her artistic practice. She left behind dozens of paintings, drawings and photographs. However, in spite of this diversity, her work is consistent with her personality and attitude to life – the tendency to, on the one hand, disappear and hide her traces, and, on the other, to build herself up through art, not just through self-portraits, which she often created, but also by marking her presence in her art in different ways.
To illustrate this process, the exhibition Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror features, in chronological order, the most important works from all periods of the artist’s career, beginning with painting, in particular the Vanishing Forms series that opened a several-year period in which Michałowska contemplated colour as a phenomenon. These contemplative or even meditative works come from a time when the artist focused primarily on this medium and did not “appear” in her art, creating abstract forms and no self-portraits.
The situation changed, but in a paradoxical way, in the 1970s, when Michałowska began to create photographic and drawing works – the series Multiplications, Multiplications: Self-Portraits (1972), Traces (1972) or Transformations (1973). What all of them have in common is the motif of the artist’s profile reduced to a multiplied sign, or rather a line of a specific shape, which produces a special aesthetic effect through replication. The multiplied outline of the artist’s face becomes a composition in which she is both present and disappears, conceals herself, becomes anonymous. And yet, there is something in these drawings and oil paintings, in how they were created, that makes us think of them as tools for careful observation of the world and registration of the effect of such looking.
This resonates even more strongly in the photographic series with the telling title Presence, which consists of a sequence of photographs arranged in sets of three. The first photo shows the whole figure of Michałowska against the background of a landscape, the second one shows a different fragment of the landscape and the artist’s partially visible portrait, as if dissolving in the surroundings – the photograph was taken using double exposure. And finally the third print shows the landscape alone, without the female figure, but with the eponymous inscription: “presence.”
Although Michałowska died only six years ago, she is remembered today by only a few people from the Wrocław art community that she helped to create. There are two main reasons for this. First, she lived to be 93, thus outliving most of her contemporaries, the members of the Wrocław Group. The second factor, more complex, is her character. In the memories of the few people who remember her, she is described as a person who was not particularly open, unwilling to share her private affairs, who did not socialize very often (and if so, it was more out of obligation than out of real need); a polite, elegant and secretive woman. Could this be an obstacle to interpreting and reading her work? Would the same situation be relevant in the case of a male artist? It is worth asking these questions, not only if individual works by women artists created during the communist era are to be subjected to contemporary interpretations, but also if we are to go beyond certain interpretive habits in order to rewrite the art history of women artists in Poland.
For these reasons, the monographic exhibition Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror is an attempt to look at the artist’s work as a process whose essential element was the construction of her own subjectivity and investigation of her relationship with the world.
Maria Michałowska (31 May 1925 – 1 September 2018) was born in Brzeżany (now Berezhany, Ukraine). From 1929 to 1944, she lived with her family in Warsaw, and from 1945 to 1947 in Krakow, where she studied Polish and English philology at the Jagiellonian University. From 1947 she was associated with Wrocław, where she studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1957 under Prof. Eugeniusz Geppert and Prof. Stanisław Pękalski. From 1958, she worked as a teacher in the Department of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture at the Faculty of Architecture of Wrocław Polytechnic (from 1982, she held the position of an associate professor, in 1991 she received the title of professor). In 1965 she joined the Wrocław School (later – Wrocław Group), and after two years she took on the responsibilities of the group’s secretary, coordinating exhibitions organized outside Wrocław. She had around a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in many group exhibitions in Poland and abroad.
Curator: Marika Kuźmicz
Collaboration on the part of the Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław: Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś
Collaboration on the part of the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław: Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber
Visual identity and architecture of the exhibition: Łukasz Izert
Production: Misia Siennicka
The Marshal of the Lower Silesia Region took the honorary patronage of the event.
Patron: KGHM Polska Miedź S.A
This project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund and from the budget of the Self-Government of the Lower Silesian Region and of the City of Wrocław.
Organisers: Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław, Museum of Architecture in Wrocław
Exhibition at the Museum of Architecture, Bernardyńska 5, Wrocław
The monographic exhibition Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror is an attempt to look at the artist’s work as a process whose essential element was the construction of her own subjectivity and investigation of her relationship with the world.
Maria Michałowska actively co-created the Wrocław avant-garde milieu for over five decades. She participated in some of the most important, groundbreaking events for Polish art, including the Wrocław ’70 Visual Arts Symposium, the SP. Conceptual Art exhibition (1970), the International Meeting of Artists, Scientists and Art Theorists in Osieki (1967) or Atelier 72 in Edinburgh (1972). The subsequent phases of her work both set the tone for changes in the field of Wrocław art and resonated with them. Although claiming that her oeuvre still needs to be “discovered” would be an overstatement, it is true that she had only eleven solo exhibitions during her lifetime and no individual presentations in the last decade.
Michałowska used various media in her artistic practice. She left behind dozens of paintings, drawings and photographs. However, in spite of this diversity, her work is consistent with her personality and attitude to life – the tendency to, on the one hand, disappear and hide her traces, and, on the other, to build herself up through art, not just through self-portraits, which she often created, but also by marking her presence in her art in different ways.
To illustrate this process, the exhibition Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror features, in chronological order, the most important works from all periods of the artist’s career, beginning with painting, in particular the Vanishing Forms series that opened a several-year period in which Michałowska contemplated colour as a phenomenon. These contemplative or even meditative works come from a time when the artist focused primarily on this medium and did not “appear” in her art, creating abstract forms and no self-portraits.
The situation changed, but in a paradoxical way, in the 1970s, when Michałowska began to create photographic and drawing works – the series Multiplications, Multiplications: Self-Portraits (1972), Traces (1972) or Transformations (1973). What all of them have in common is the motif of the artist’s profile reduced to a multiplied sign, or rather a line of a specific shape, which produces a special aesthetic effect through replication. The multiplied outline of the artist’s face becomes a composition in which she is both present and disappears, conceals herself, becomes anonymous. And yet, there is something in these drawings and oil paintings, in how they were created, that makes us think of them as tools for careful observation of the world and registration of the effect of such looking.
This resonates even more strongly in the photographic series with the telling title Presence, which consists of a sequence of photographs arranged in sets of three. The first photo shows the whole figure of Michałowska against the background of a landscape, the second one shows a different fragment of the landscape and the artist’s partially visible portrait, as if dissolving in the surroundings – the photograph was taken using double exposure. And finally the third print shows the landscape alone, without the female figure, but with the eponymous inscription: “presence.”
Although Michałowska died only six years ago, she is remembered today by only a few people from the Wrocław art community that she helped to create. There are two main reasons for this. First, she lived to be 93, thus outliving most of her contemporaries, the members of the Wrocław Group. The second factor, more complex, is her character. In the memories of the few people who remember her, she is described as a person who was not particularly open, unwilling to share her private affairs, who did not socialize very often (and if so, it was more out of obligation than out of real need); a polite, elegant and secretive woman. Could this be an obstacle to interpreting and reading her work? Would the same situation be relevant in the case of a male artist? It is worth asking these questions, not only if individual works by women artists created during the communist era are to be subjected to contemporary interpretations, but also if we are to go beyond certain interpretive habits in order to rewrite the art history of women artists in Poland.
For these reasons, the monographic exhibition Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror is an attempt to look at the artist’s work as a process whose essential element was the construction of her own subjectivity and investigation of her relationship with the world.
Maria Michałowska (31 May 1925 – 1 September 2018) was born in Brzeżany (now Berezhany, Ukraine). From 1929 to 1944, she lived with her family in Warsaw, and from 1945 to 1947 in Krakow, where she studied Polish and English philology at the Jagiellonian University. From 1947 she was associated with Wrocław, where she studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1957 under Prof. Eugeniusz Geppert and Prof. Stanisław Pękalski. From 1958, she worked as a teacher in the Department of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture at the Faculty of Architecture of Wrocław Polytechnic (from 1982, she held the position of an associate professor, in 1991 she received the title of professor). In 1965 she joined the Wrocław School (later – Wrocław Group), and after two years she took on the responsibilities of the group’s secretary, coordinating exhibitions organized outside Wrocław. She had around a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in many group exhibitions in Poland and abroad.
Curator: Marika Kuźmicz
Collaboration on the part of the Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław: Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś
Collaboration on the part of the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław: Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber
Visual identity and architecture of the exhibition: Łukasz Izert
Production: Misia Siennicka
The Marshal of the Lower Silesia Region took the honorary patronage of the event.
Patron: KGHM Polska Miedź S.A
This project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund and from the budget of the Self-Government of the Lower Silesian Region and of the City of Wrocław.
Maria Michałowska in her studio, 1960s/1970s, photo by Zdzisław Jurkiewicz, archive of the artist's family
Untitled, from the series Landscapes, oil on canvas, private collection
Interferences III, 1978, oil on canvas, collection: National Museum in Wrocław
