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Karolina Kolenda:<\/strong> Critical texts on your artistic practice, especially those recent ones, approach your oeuvre in the context of the dominant narratives in the art history of the 20th<\/sup> century. They stress your role in Wroc\u0142aw\u2019s artistic milieu in the 1970s, especially during the Wroc\u0142aw \u201870 Visual Arts Symposium, or your exhibition at Jerzy Ludwi\u0144ski\u2019s Mona Lisa Gallery. Were you, or did you want to be, involved in the discussions that were held there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anna Szpakowska-Kujawska:<\/strong> I wasn\u2019t involved in them. Ludwi\u0144ski invited me to the exhibition because Jerzy Roso\u0142owicz, who was my friend, told him about my works. Ludwi\u0144ski visited me in my tiny studio and asked if I\u2019d like to have an exhibition in a month\u2019s time. I had three Atoms<\/em> at the time, so I said I had to finish one more painting so that there would be four. But we decided to keep it a secret, because he was \u201cthe avant-garde\u201d and I was \u2013 what can I say \u2013 a housewife. So we decided not to talk about it, but to \u201cshoot the exhibition.\u201d And so we did. People were surprised. It was a new cycle, supposedly it made an impression on some. The name Atoms<\/em> came from the fact that a friend showed photographs of these works to his wife, and she exclaimed: \u201cOh, that\u2019s us!\u201d [Polish: \u201cA, to my!\u201d, which is a homonym of Atomy<\/em>].<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> You have indicated on numerous occasions that you intended your works to be realistic. At the same time, you used various media, such as figurative painting, collage, and finally spatial, abstract objects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASz-K: <\/strong>Ideas come to me ready, in colours, but the topic needs polishing. In the series Meadows<\/em>, especially Meadows Two<\/em>, I refer to the colours of meadows and the pattern of the grasses. In Meadow Winglings<\/em> I tried to remember what the meadows and fields in Las\u00f3wka look like. What I actually do is recreate what I saw. It\u2019s mimetic, which I sometimes hold against myself. The same applies to written works, where I try to recreate, for example, the current of the \u015awider River near Otwock. The ocean balls are a reminder of what water bubbles look like, how water crashes against the shore. I don\u2019t create anything from scratch, I just happen to have a visual memory. What I sketch fuels my imagination. Then I try to recreate how the branches, needles, leaves were arranged, this is my realism. What I draw gets stuck in my head and I have no choice but to develop it in various forms. When I finished the series of nature studies, I immediately began the spatial works. Initially on boxes, then in other materials. And I never went back to my drawings, I didn\u2019t repeat them, but I somehow carry all of them in me. Once I have worked through a topic in one form, it begins to reappear in others. Some of my objects may seem to have nothing to do with nature, but they actually result from all these drawings, from observation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> Your interest in nature appeared in your art (and for a time superseded your interest in man) during your stay in Nigeria (1977\u20131984). Your paintings from the Gardens<\/em> series (1979) contain representations of nature that are still anthropomorphised \u2013 vegetal forms with eyes, legs, curious, but also aggressive, pesky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASz-K: <\/strong>The eyes, which I placed everywhere, expressed my need for contact. I was creating my companions. When I left Poland for Nigeria, I didn\u2019t understand Yoruba or English, I perceived the world through my eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> Some calabashes, \u200b\u200bi.e. paintings created on woody gourds, heralded increasingly sculptural, irregular, spatial forms. The colours of the works also became more vivid. Was it an expression of your increasing openness to nature resulting from the experience of the African landscape?<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASz-K:<\/strong> I longed for nature very much there, but there was no \u201cnormal\u201d nature as I knew it. Everything was entangled, fiercely competing, no straight lines. Then I made Ayorinde<\/em> (Joy Has Come<\/em>) \u2013 a calabash connected with the expected return to Poland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> After coming back to Wroc\u0142aw in the early 1980s, there was a significant change in your work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASz-K:<\/strong> After my return, I created works referring to my journey through the Sahara: drawings in the Road Through the Desert<\/em> series and the calabashes The Desert Wingling<\/em> and The Spring<\/em>, made of sand brought from the desert; a spatial version of sketches depicting the desert landscape, both seen during my journey and as a reaction to martial law in Poland. Under the influence of martial law, man returned in my art \u2013 a troubled man. At the same time, I made the series Disappearing<\/em>. It was a time when, at the age of 55, I realised that I was becoming invisible, transparent, that I was disappearing. In the forest by the sea, I started to arrange needles to form the shape of a face. Subsequent works were created in Wroc\u0142aw, as I was watching the garden near my home, tree branches and grasses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> The ceramic work Grasses, My Grasses<\/em> (2001), which in a way closes the cycle of paintings and spatial cut-outs based on your haiku poems, seems to be an attempt to express the word through sculpture and to convey the appearance and impression exerted by nature on man. The rhythm of words becomes increasingly subordinated to the rhythms of nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASz-K: <\/strong>Both in my poems and in the Scribbles<\/em> series, I tried to convey the rhythm of nature. I wrote: \u201cI exist through the expanses of meadows. I look out the window as spring matures, matures. As the buds burst, burst. As leaves grow, grow. As the wind rustles them, rustles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> Representations of the local nature of Las\u00f3wka in the form of collages made from many cut-up watercolour sketches of the landscape are characterised, first, by the resignation from a \u201ccomprehensive vision\u201d of the landscape, and, second, by going beyond the classical landscape composition rooted in the Western painting tradition and based on linear perspective. This perspective privileged man and individual seeing, the world existed only as an image to be viewed. Did this fragmentation and resignation from a comprehensive vision in favour of looking at the details indicate resignation from the humanistic principle of the primacy of man over nature?<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASz-K:<\/strong> The works created in Las\u00f3wka resulted from walks and observations. The way of representation resulted from the fact that they are close-ups. There is no sky here. I\u2019m interested in what lies on the ground. It\u2019s not about the views, how nature looks. My works are about rhythms \u2013 rhythms in nature. The rhythms of the waves on the Orlica river. In each work there is a simultaneous existence of many thoughts, one followed by another, but all of them adding up to unity. Hence the Roads to Within<\/em> series. All that looking at grasses, at branches, makes up the whole that I feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> The exhibition Breaking up the Darkness<\/em>, curated by Anna Markowska and opened at 66P on 14 May 2022, features few paintings, focusing primarily on objects that you call \u201cwinglings.\u201d Where did this term come from?<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASz-K:<\/strong> After the grass was cut on the meadows near Las\u00f3wka, round bales were left, which to me looked as if the Earth had wings. In the house in Las\u00f3wka, I found branches cut into rings that reminded me of them. I kept working with wood until I ran out of material. Later I got into the \u201cwingling amok.\u201d I was looking for other materials. The<\/em> Singing Wingling<\/em> is partly made of wood, but it already has irregularly shaped elements. The<\/em> Air Wingling<\/em> is made of roots and branches that I put together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> Your Winglings<\/em>, created in reaction to the nature of the Bystrzyckie Mountains, and at the same time organically combining an element from Nigeria (the calabash) and a local one (wood from Las\u00f3wka), express your intimate, personal experience of nature. However, their form \u2013 dynamic, entering into spatial relationships, vividly colourful \u2013 seems to perfectly match the goals of large-scale sculpture in public space. How do you perceive the transition from your personal Wingling <\/em>from Las\u00f3wka to The<\/em> City Wingling<\/em> in front of the gallery?<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASzK:<\/strong> This is a dream come true. It was The<\/em> City Wingling<\/em> that I particularly wanted to see enlarged in the city. I was lucky that these fantastic people \u2013 Jerzy Kosa\u0142ka and Tomasz Opania \u2013 decided to get involved in it. In fact, they took it upon themselves to come up with the design and the execution. I took part in the painting as much as I could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK: <\/strong>In recent years, different people have remembered and tried to reconstruct the significance of your projects and organisational work for the Wroc\u0142aw \u201970 Visual Arts Symposium, whose original aim was to make the city more aesthetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASzK:<\/strong> Wroc\u0142aw was full of rubble, roads and facades were neglected. There was a shortage of materials. Sculptures made of metal during symposiums and festivals in various places in Poland corroded and deteriorated. As part of the Symposium, I joined Marian Bogusz\u2019s team. Everyone came up with an idea for a project, but it was abstract because there were no materials to make them. As a result, few of the ideas were implemented, only those by Henryk Sta\u017cewski and Jerzy Bere\u015b. Once the anniversary of the return of the Western Lands to the Motherland was over, which was a pretext for the organisation of the Symposium, no one thought about implementing the remaining projects. On the other hand, the lack of physical manifestations of these ideas went down in art history as a moment when the power of Wroc\u0142aw\u2019s conceptual art revealed itself. But in fact, everyone had a drawing, a design with technical details and a list of materials. Then conceptualism came and we became famous. But I had nothing to do with it. Two years afterwards, I made the ceramic decoration on the wall of the Faculty of Mathematics building, and later the plafond in the Lower Silesian Public Library. This was my contribution to beautifying the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> In the context of the current exhibition and the materialisation of The City Wingling<\/em> in public space, can the unrealised work with human figures in the shape of balloons proposed by you at the Symposium [Spatial Composition<\/em>, 1970] be perceived as a kind of prelude to your contemporary projects and activities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASzK:<\/strong> Yes, but at the same time it is an extension of painting. When I paint a wingling, I have to keep repeating the same painting around it. The winglings refer to the rhythms of nature, the colourful lines are the lines of the fields. I think that through these works I\u2019m getting closer to the works of my father [Wac\u0142aw Szpakowski]. What I observe in nature repeats itself, but what I see is also the result of the repeated gaze \u2013 there is no singularity of gaze or thought. Hence the attempt to expand into space and the need to approach the topic from all sides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n KK:<\/strong> Art arises from a personal, inner need, but it is also addressed to the viewer. What is your measure of success of certain works: appreciation by the audience, the success of your own vision? When can you say, \u201cI\u2019ve made it\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n ASz-K:<\/strong> The most important thing is that a work is in line with the original thought, that flash of light in the mind. It is successful when it is a piece of truth, my truth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n When I paint a wingling, I have to keep repeating the same painting around it. The winglings refer to the rhythms of nature, the colourful lines are the lines of the fields. Karolina Kolenda talks with the artist.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5365,"parent":0,"menu_order":20,"template":"","categories":[68],"informacja":[],"termin":[142],"class_list":["post-5387","wystawa","type-wystawa","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-information","termin-archival","description-off"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226.jpg",1707,1707,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-500x500.jpg",500,500,true],"medium":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-300x300.jpg",300,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-768x768.jpg",768,768,true],"large":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1024x1024.jpg",1024,1024,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1536x1536.jpg",1536,1536,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-2048x1365.jpg",2048,1365,true],"qi_addons_for_elementor_image_size_square":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226.jpg",650,650,false],"qi_addons_for_elementor_image_size_landscape":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226.jpg",650,650,false],"qi_addons_for_elementor_image_size_portrait":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226.jpg",650,650,false],"qi_addons_for_elementor_image_size_huge-square":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226.jpg",1300,1300,false],"woocommerce_thumbnail":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-760x760.jpg",760,760,true],"woocommerce_single":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-655x655.jpg",655,655,true],"woocommerce_gallery_thumbnail":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-200x200.jpg",200,200,true],"wpsso-schema-1x1":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1200x1200.jpg",1200,1200,true],"wpsso-schema-4x3":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1200x900.jpg",1200,900,true],"wpsso-schema-16x9":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1200x675.jpg",1200,675,true],"wpsso-thumbnail":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1200x628.jpg",1200,628,true],"wpsso-opengraph":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1200x628.jpg",1200,628,true],"wpsso-tc-summary":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1200x1200.jpg",1200,1200,true],"wpsso-tc-lrgimg":["https:\/\/66p.pl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/DSC_5158-2-scaled-e1655204410226-1200x628.jpg",1200,628,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"iovo","author_link":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/author"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"When I paint a wingling, I have to keep repeating the same painting around it. The winglings refer to the rhythms of nature, the colourful lines are the lines of the fields. Karolina Kolenda talks with the artist.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wystawa\/5387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wystawa"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/wystawa"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wystawa\/5387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25194,"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wystawa\/5387\/revisions\/25194"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5387"},{"taxonomy":"informacja","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/informacja?post=5387"},{"taxonomy":"termin","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/66p.pl\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/termin?post=5387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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