{"id":5029,"date":"2022-04-28T11:12:09","date_gmt":"2022-04-28T09:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/?p=5029"},"modified":"2025-07-14T11:13:50","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T09:13:50","slug":"breaking-up-the-darkness-anna-szpakowska-kujawska","status":"publish","type":"wystawa","link":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wystawa\/breaking-up-the-darkness-anna-szpakowska-kujawska","title":{"rendered":"Breaking up the Darkness.<\/b> Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Duration: May 14 \u2013 July 8, 2022
meeting with the artist: June 30, 2022, at 6:00 PM<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska, a doyen of the Wroc\u0142aw art scene (diploma at the Faculty of Architectural Painting of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in 1956), is primarily a painter. However, she has decided that the exhibition at 66P should feature several dozen spatial objects, most of them created recently. She calls them \u201cthe winged ones.\u201d One of such winged objects, enlarged several times by Jerzy Kosa\u0142ka and Tomasz Opania, was erected just before the vernissage outside 66P, from the side of Ksi\u0119cia Witolda Street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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fot. \u0141ukasz Kujawski<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

More about the sculpture: The City Wingling<\/em> of Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska enlarged by Jerzy Kosa\u0142ka and Tomasz Opania.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The exhibition Breaking up the Darkness<\/em> resonates with the energy of Szpakowska-Kujawska\u2019s colourful and luminous works against a dark background. They flash and glow in the dark, radiating their peculiarly untameable vital energy. Form-wise, the featured objects are situated at the intersection of the abstract and figurative trends. Their universal message is the visualisation of a strange, indifferent and alien world, whose cruelty and beauty mix according to impenetrable yet reasoned rules. A formative experience for the artist was the Second World War, and in terms of art \u2013 works by her father Wac\u0142aw Szpakowski. Later, there was Matisse seen by her in Vence, travels around Asia and seven years spent in Africa. She used her works to record her experiences \u2013 of life and art, of a child looking at war. Although she started from very intimate memories, what she most wanted was to share those of them which, in spite of everything, offered hope and promised to face and overcome indifference and strangeness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exhibition focuses on the artist\u2019s recent works, but in order to give a more complete picture of her artistic experiments, it also includes some of her older pieces. They are characterised by spherical spatiality, described by the artist as \u201centering the sphere.\u201d However, she used the phrase to refer not only to her long-lasting formal experiments, but also to her attempt to combine divergent sensations and experiences in one whole. She eventually settled on the form of spatial mandalas, which resulted from both the search for a safe haven and the desire to express deep connections with the surroundings. Apart from interpersonal relations, they reveal a fascination with the biological world and inanimate matter. The spherical form, explored by the artist since the 1970s in Wroc\u0142aw, was further developed in Africa, when her intuition combined the resonance of musical and visual rhythms. There, she discovered an unusual foundation for her works: spherical gourds, or calabashes, which trigger associations with the protection of the mother\u2019s belly and the pain of childbirth. The exhibition Breaking up the Darkness <\/em>features both older works, such as the calabashes, and more recent ones: the winged and spatial objects and several paintings from the series entitled Roads to Within<\/em>. Such an approach illustrates her departure from the flatness of the painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The colourful spatial objects are not a direct extension of painting, because their conspicuously three-dimensional nature almost turns them into living creatures. They are extraordinary visitors \u2013 guests who disrupt our everyday life with their intriguing, material presence. Each of them has something akin to an eye looking back at the viewer and demanding action. This eye is closely connected with what the artist terms her inner red light<\/em>. When switched on, it indicates the need for immediate reaction \u2013 of both herself in the creative process and the viewer in the reception process. This is why it seems as if the mysterious objects desire something very much. Above all, they want people to change their language for describing the world in order to be able to marvel at it anew, open their eyes to what has been summarily dismissed as too ordinary or obvious. The influence of the spatial objects on the attentive viewer can be seen by watching the film accompanying the exhibition, which will premiere on the opening day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Preview of the film Breaking up the Darkness. Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska directed by: Anna Markowska and Jacek Chamot<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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