The Wozownia art gallery is one of the oldest galleries in Poland – it exists since 1950. Now it occupies an interesting, historical building in the oldest part of Toruń, near the Old Town Hall and the Copernicus House. Wozownia is sponsored by the local government. 

The gallery displays all aspects of present-day art. Recently other forms of activity have been introduced to accompany ‘traditional’ exhibitions. They comprise not only educational activities such as lectures on history of art or workshops for children. New media that have found their way into arts e.g. video, hypermedia, interactive arts, performance, para-theatrical activities naturally call for a modern manner of presentation.

The gallery’s cyclic activities:

International Graphic Triennial „Colour in Graphic Art” exists since 1981; it assumes a presentation of works by the greatest graphic artists from all over the world. From the very beginning it has been oriented at problem of functioning of colour in graphic art. Artists taking part in the triennial are invited by name. 

Triennial of Small Size Painting – all-Polish competitive exhibition existing since 1988; it shows new tendencies in painting. The biennale is curated by Teresa Dudzińska.

PERSONA –  exists since 2002; the aim of PERSONA is to present the most important personalities of poster art from all over the world.

The author’s programs:

Since 2004 Projekt Wozownia. Laboratorium Sztuki (Wozownia Project. The Laboratory of Art) – solo exhibitions having ‘site specific’ character.

The curator of the above projects was Małgorzata Jankowska and now the curator is Maria Niemyjska.

Wozownia Art Gallery is located in the Old Town; within short distance from Old Town Market Square, right along Ducha Św. Street to Klasztorna Gate.
                                                     

Romanian author Nicu Ilfoveanu set up an melancholic journey through time and space, tramping around Romanian cities, towns and villages, roads and wilderness. Contributing to the creation of the effect of distancing from the landscapes and people presented is the black-and-white aesthetics dominant in Ilfoveanu's work: it imposes a filter of nostalgia onto the photographs and suggests remoteness. There is no sense of direct contact or contemporaneity between the viewer and a given motif, instead, a kind of aura emerges which not only does not disappear despite the technological reproductivity, as suggested by Walter Benjamin, but rather generates the effect of a certain distance with great intensity. Ilfoveanu's camera mediates images, distorting, by the way, the linear flow of time and binding the past with the present, the close with the distant.

 

Magdalena Moskwa's paintings exist somewhere in between what is outside and what is inside, implying life in its bloom and at the same time getting wounded and bleeding (to death), picturing density  of the skin as a smooth and hermetic shield for our bodies, but also letting our gaze slip through to see the open wounds. Moskwa is equally devoted and transfixed by the human mucosa and membranes showing their moisture shimmering in the sun like a rainbow. The softness of those damp, delicate tissues challenges the gaze with their iridescent glow and perverse beauty of the viscera that are generally thought disgusting. Artists paintings use this academic outfit, and putting scope on formal features. There is a strong link between her art and traditions of the past, especially with the religious art. There are some clear references to the reliquaries, revealed in a pious manner she handles human figures – Moskwa presents them similarly to the glazed boxes, where we can see the hidden “sanctity”.

 

Art Laboratory 2013. (Mis)Understanding 

curated by: Maria Niemyjska

 

 

Grzegorz Łoznikow’s work, which is presented in the cycle (Mis)Understanding, deals with the issue of interpretational ambiguity. The artist proceeded a provocative experiment – he created a sculpture which has at the same time features of lightning, tree, vain, fracture in the wall… As he told, he aims to pay attention to the lack of meanings in the nature and to the process of emerging significations in visual activity. 

 

Grzegorz Łoznikow 

Born in 1987 in Jelenia Góra. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. He draws, paints, creates installations and videos. In his works he inquires considerations of visual languages.

 

 

 

The Cinematic defect of solitude consists in the skillful borrowing and transformation of the features belonging to both media in order to achieve visually coherent photographic totality – “a slim object” which simultaneously transgresses its own boundaries in search of a way to present that which is difficult to describe. The Cinematic Defect of Solitude indicates suffering, helplessness, solitude which were usually rejected in the iconography of art history – they do not exist, as Sontag wrote, since they are not ennobled by either human or divine wrath. It was not until photography and cinematography claimed them, establishing their new history and iconography, yet, as one should bear in mind, still not free from traps and abuse. 

 

 

08. 03. - 07. 04. 2013
 

Iwona Szpak-Pawłowska graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the Nicolas Copernicus University in 2006, where she is currently an assistant lecturer. Her interests focus on painting, architecture, installation, object. 

 

Levitating spatial system consist of multiplied, hang in space objects. They emerge from the darkness in ultraviolet and correspond with themselves and with the spectator. Ultraviolet creates kind of „electronic” view, which meets the spirit of our times. Levitating objects unite rationality with irrationality and the earthiness with the cosmos. 

 

An object consisting of few tubes, which reflect light with their inside surface. Point of view decides on what we see inside the object. Dynamic deformations and optic illusions refer to the idea of painting with light instead of paint. 

 

Art Laboratory 2013. (Mis)Understanding
Curated by: Maria Niemyjska 

 

 

Karolina Żyniewicz’s exhibition is a second one show in the cycle (Mis)understanding. “Quarantine” is a project which consist of a ”sterile” installation referring to the esthetics of the laboratory and two constructions including chemical processes. The processes are based on the artistic, not scientific logic. The artist uses scientific procedures, but deprived of its purposefulness. She rather gives them meaning connected with her subjective needs. 

 

Born in 1984. She graduated from the Department of Visual Education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. She creates objects-oddities inspired by medicine and organic processes. 

 

 

Body Stories is a set of visual and textual stories, which take up problems of body – its sensuality, emotions, limitations and language. 

The set took forms of drawing and pictorial installations, which predominant coulour is red. Its temperature driven me to describe a statement of body, which goes beyond language. 

Body Stories are my encounters with language of body detached from discursive language. Geometry of body meets Euclidean geometry and contemporary lingua latina meets my native language. 

Work on Body Stories is accompanied by questions about capability of language, its limitations, exhausting and identification with it. Which areas of my life can language express in words? Which ones does it leave unnamed? Which ones have names mismatched to my own feelings? Which states, events, emotions does language follow? Which ones does it pass over not having possibility to define them and find their equivalents in writing? 

Body Stories is a confrontation important, routed in language part of my identity with its nonlinguistic  areas – feeling and intuition. It is my statement about linguistic experience of world and its processes, framed by linguistic categories. I call language into question and I try to overstep this frame and let out myself to the context beyond language. 

Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka, September 2012

 

Małgorzata Dawidek Gryglicka in his artistic practice moving between literature and the visual arts - is a visual songwriter, hypertext, text-painting installations in galleries and public spaces. The artist is interested in the communication aspect of language - the relationship between words, images, and designates it. With the body text she talks about organic physicality understood as a continuous narrative, the text in the process.
www.dawidek.art.pl

 

 

 

Barbara Sosnowska-Bałdyga, jak i Stanisław Bałdyga both graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the Nicolas Copernicus University in Toruń. Barbara Sosnowska-Bałdyga constantly experiments with techniques and means of expression. Stanisław Bałdyga consequently has worked with linocut for over 40 years. In his work he searches for space, light, form, rhythm and harmony. Laborious process of producing a linocut is an adventure for the artist. The exhibition in Wozownia follows a previous presentation in the Castle Museum in Lublin. 

 

 

 

In Anna Kutera’s latest project „POST Newspaper Love” realized in 2010, the artist reached for the mass media, and above all the magazines, making them the material for art. The starting point for the creation of these works were the contents found in weeklies, bi-weeklies, on television, in the internet portals. Any associations, with the  strategy of pop-art in this case are justified, but the POST Newspaper Love clearly echoes the conceptual and contextual art, reflecting the artist’s artistic roots. At the forefront here is the issue of form, as well as of the techniques used by Kutera, to which both the appearance if the work and its message is subordinated. 

 

Anna Kutera born in 1952, graduated at the Faculty of Painting, Graphic Arts and Sculpture of the State Collage of Fine Arts in Wrocław. She is a multimedia artist. Her artistic activities include film, video, photography, painting, installation and performance. She combined her artistic activities with the activities of an artistic community animator. 

 

 

 

The project “Object to Come Into. Heads” is arranged in a small space of Wozownia Art Gallery. The artist claims that “head is the most important instrument of our life experience. What is inside the head is crucial for all human output. Spirit hidden behind a fragile “shell” of face (…)  opens unimaginable spaces. It becomes a place for discovering of new world. It is an object to come into.”

The exhibition introduces to the bigger display of the project in January 2013. 

 

Karolina Komasa graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. She made her diploma in sculpture in 1998 at the atelier of the professor Danuta Maczek. She works at the University of Art in Poznań. Her artistic activity includes sculpture, object and installation art. 

 

Art Laboratory 2012. Big Deal!

curated by: Maria Niemyjska

 

 

Stańczak’s exhibition closes the cycle Big Deal! which have been carried out for last 2 years. The artist presents a series of small, precisely executed dioramas. They represent destructed, abandoned buildings and fragments of degraded landscape. Wittingly detached from their previous context and partially merged in congealed paint, they present mysterious realities, hanging between two different modes of reality. 

Kamil Stańczak born in 1980. He made his diploma in 2004 at the Art Department at the UMCS in Lublin. He works at the paternal department at the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture. He paints, creates objects and installations. 

 

Curated by: Małgorzata Jankowska
 

…From the very beginning Izabella Gustowska was more interested in the image of reality than reality itself. She was mainly interested in these images which are commonly thought to be true, certain and authoritative representations of reality. i.e photographic and film images. The artist proposed a seemingly paradoxical reversal of the situation, regarding the representations of reality as more real than the reality itself. Yet it is not a paradox ; the world is available to us through images, which we treat as more or less credible representations of reality. One can say that we can see images, but the reality hidden behind them can be only guessed and speculated about.” 

(Ryszard Kluszczyński, “More true than the truth”, catalogue of the exhibition “Relative Similarities”, Arsenał Gallery 2000)

Multimedia exhibition prepared for Wozownia Art Gallery includes project focused on the fictional figure of a young artist Antonina de Lodi (Italian surname of Gustowska’s grandmother). Particular events from her life form a multithreaded visual spectacle in the gallery space.

 

 

 

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the triennial of contemporary graphic arts in Toruń, an event centred on the issue of colour in the medium. Today, while still important, colour is no longer such a compelling technical or theoretical issue. This is mainly due to the development of digital techniques, which trivialized the presence of colour in graphic arts. The aspect of the technique is now of secondary importance, although, paradoxically, it remains an important factor sanctioning the presence of colour in graphic arts. In the light of all these changes, questions which try to define the condition and reality of contemporary graphic arts should take precedence over the question about colour. 

This year’s edition of the international event in Toruń, the seventh one to date, tries to tackle this new reality. The decision to devote it entirely to digital graphics shifts the focus of attention to the assimilation of state-of-the-art image coding and processing technologies in the field of the graphic medium. Importantly, the simple narrowing of the scope made it possible to put emphasis on issues lying at the heart of contemporary graphic arts, and the clash of digital techniques and colour made it possible to put the relationship between traditional forms of graphic techniques and digital works in a different perspective. Infused with new life, the formula, paradoxically, shows that although considerably less emphasis is placed on colour, it remains strategically important in graphic arts. In this respect, this year’s edition of the event is truly exceptional. It is a specific retrospective of thirty years of changes, which have entirely transformed the medium.

 

 

Curated by: Krzysztof Jurecki

 

The exhibition was meant to show richness and diversity within the self/portrait as a genre and hopefully to provoke lively discussion about the transformations it underwent. The main purpose of this exhibition is to present the newcomers, including debuting artists, but also to remind ourselves about those sadly forgotten, but still remarkable and relevant traits. 

There is an undeniable potential in self/portrait to reveal human complexity, its depth, possibly physical impairment and deformities so keenly exposed by modern art movements like Expressionism or Surrealism. Artists still aim for the vivid reflection of the state of human soul on the sitter’s face. These days it’s not only a postmodern pastiche that is required but also an attempt to find a new genre of “otherness”, in an entirely new manner and expression.

 

 

Dirty Hands exhibition presents two, seemingly quite different aesthetics, clashing and confronting them together only to fuse them into one captivating tale. A tale of perverse limitation of our bodies, their capability of turning into a liquid matter or disintegrate into cornucopia of small entities. This is a tale in which fauna and flora, dream and reality, fear and great curiosity constantly permeate one another. 

An expression dirty hands steers us toward childhood and its innocent charm. Children’s hands muddy from the mixture of dirt, grass and debris are physically dirty but what they symbolise is pure and raw wildness of the human spirit. They are the sign of our union with nature and with our most primal instincts. Justyna and Aleksandra’s art is partly about this peculiar connection. Minimalistic and austere images by Adamczyk or plentiful in their abundance of forms Urban’s paintings display deep affirmation of magical alchemy and biology seen in every possible life form.

 

 

Rafał Boettner-Łubowski’s installation presents few surprising visual citations in an untypical context. Moreover, it reveals an attempt of creating a reflexive narration dealing with the gallery space and more general problems connected with art, culture, game of deception and an ambiguity of occurrences typical of dynamic changes in contemporary world. 

The artist’s interests focus on the repetition and citation in art. In his sculptures, installations as well as in texts he corresponds with the artistic tradition and he considers its transformations. 

 

22.06-22.07.2012
Curated by: Marta Smolińska

 

The pixel paintings by the Berlin-based duo Urban Art (Anne Peschken and Marek Pisarsky) presented at the Wozownia Art Gallery in Toruń revolve around 20th-century German history, which they illustrate by means of a several key images: a view from a Reichsparteitag (the annual rally and convention of the NSDAP); a look inside the Bundestag and the Stock Exchange, a scene of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a reference to the communist regime and its familiar slogan “Workers of the world…” The subjects are visually intense and poignant, capturing the eye and demanding one’s attention. The reason they work in exactly this way lies in the fact that they originate from well-known photographs of crucial historic events that have already deeply inscribed themselves into society’s collective mind and consciousness by constant repetition and numerous reproductions. Apart from dealing with the issue of constructing history and the constant influx of visual templates, the pixel paintings also touch on the issue of overproduction and art recycling. The paintings produced by the “Globalpix” company consist of woven strips of canvas donated by people who responded to the advert posted by “Urban Art”. The strips are then interwoven and initially create an arbitrary image mounted onto new stretchers. 

 

 

Iwona Chmielewska graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the Nicolas Copernicus University in Toruń, where she works as a lecturer in domain of artistic book. 

She mainly creates picturebooks for children – most of them have been published in South Corea. In her books texts and pictures have the same importance.  Her extraordinary pictorial language helps to introduce to the books important, social issues. 

Iwona Chmielewska cooperates with Gimpel Verlag publishing house. Gimpel Verlag has published recently her book “Blumkas Diary” in Germany. It’s a story about an orphanage run by Janusz Korczak. The book, as well as its author, have been numerously rewarded in Poland and abroad. 

 

 

25.05 – 17.06. 2012
Curated by: Ola Sojak

 

 

The first edition of the event was presented in Wozownia in spring 2008. The 5th edition is a summary of previous 4 editions. It is followed by declaration I DREW –  I DRAW – I WILL DRAW. WE DREW – WE DRAW – WE WILL DRAW. This statement should encourage to pick up problems of time, duration, transition and continuation. The event is based on a competition – the exhibition includes works chosen by organizers. Among the works are traditional drawings as well as experiments.

 

Curated by: Krzysztof Jurecki

 

Sylwia Kowalczyk has been highly focussed on working with portraiture and self-portraiture since the start of her photographic career. Her first body of work 'Selfprojections' dealt with visual concepts and superimposed the artist's self-portraits onto three dimensional interiors. The subsequent body of work 'Chicas' moved away from an individual into recording a whole group of undentifiable young women, and in a mock documentary series of arranged situations recorded a generation's dilemmas and life choices. The origin of these scenarios can be traced to the surrealist art approach and its dreamlike states. New ways of exploration of portrait show her latest photographic cycles Temporal Portraits (2009-2010) and Nightwatching (2011). 

 

Sylwia Kowalczyk was born in Lublin, Poland in 1978. She is a graduate of the department of Graphic Design in the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and a Master of Fine Art in the Department of Photography of Edinburgh College of Art. She lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work was shown during the prestigious Month of Photograpy in Bratislava (2002), in Poland during the 3rd Photography Biennial in Poznan (2003) and at a solo show in Wozownia Gallery in Torun (2007).

 

Marcin Berdyszak
White shadow
20. 04. - 20. 05. 2012
It’s the shaky, uncertain aspects of modern day reality that capture Marcin Berdyszak’s attention. His installations use visual language to “tell” their stories, using cleverly combined items or fruit, accompanied by suitable colour scheme, packaging and often lighting. In subsequent stages of artist’s creative path all kinds of objects emerge. They become the means of expression employed to serve various ideas. In his earlier works Berdyszak often adhered to fruit as a mean of confrontation: nature versus culture, or to explore blurring borderlines between those two, however recently his focus is on entirely different object from his visual thesaurus. A walking stick. The one used by the elderly to support themselves with, the white cane used by the blind, crutches of the disabled, even a posh cane, an attribute of a dandy - all of them bearing particular meaning, each evoking different semantic potential.
Marta Smolińska

 

21st century. Has it yet managed to establish its own individuality in a diachronic linear development of humankind? And have we – the Europeans – become comfortably familiar with the dimensions of the New Era? I have this vague premonition we might never again feel like conquerors, pancreators. Something slipped out of our hands… Everything seemed under control, still it feels like the gravity have been shifted and suddenly different perspectives onto the global evolution have become of significance. Oops…

 Marcin Berdyszak’s creative productions are part of this world and constitute its perfect resemblance. It doesn’t define it. And since it’s art it is more of a log full of records of the artist’s state of mind (There is a simple psychological definition of art if ever there was one). It resembles set of puzzles. Assembled artefacts look like a mosaic with large pieces covering the surface with the uniform pattern, this pattern however lacks constancy. Are there any motifs in it? No, there are none, there are some entireties which could just as easily work in a different arrangement. Berdyszak knows about it and takes advantage of this fact. This kind of occurrence used to be called an “art motif”. It’s not a motif. This is an independent, self-sufficient genome. It can be relocated into a different situation and function in a new environment as fittingly it does elsewhere.

With the end of 20th century we have walked into a new tribalism where we have stayed up to this day. Existing ideologies no longer suffice but no new ones have yet been accepted. Humans are aware they can survive without ideologies but under one condition… Still, can this condition be met on this stage of our social evolution? This “western world” of ours, sometimes less politically correct called “the white man’s world” is adrift… It is a piece of –smaller than previously thought – wholeness constituted by many different cultures and human races of the entire Earth. It becomes clear the same piece can fit into many different societies and ethnic groups. As if in fear that his evil scheme of world domination may fail, white man created a device called mass culture. Here, yet again, he felt something slipping from his reach. After all if it’s supposed to be mass-related, it has to be produced and consumed by masses. When exactly does a large number of consumers and participants become a mass?  
Elżbieta Kościelak

 

13. 04- 6. 05. 2012
Curated by: Szymon Piotr Kubiak

 

Tatjana Schülke’s exhibition refers to the historical rudiments of collecting and displaying, which are currently considered in numerous research works, curatorial strategies and artistic projects. Her collection of allegedly abstract sculptures, wall hangings and collages, helps to create a space similar to the kunstkamer and wunderkamer. Tatjana Schülke unreservedly admires creations of nature still. This admiration is accompanied by the constant search for “hidden souls of unanimated objects”. Just like in titular installation Einsichten – Aussichten (Insights and Outlooks, 1998) or the assemblage inside out, 2008 where she effortlessly combines micro and macro cosmos.

Tatjana Schülke was born in 1960 in Bonn. She graduated from Hochschule der Künste in Berlin (1982-89). She received a Karl Hofer Fundation Award. She was a winner of Tempelhof-Schöneberger Kunstpreis Contest.  She lives and works in w Berlin.

 

Project: Debuts 

curated by: Katarzyna Lewandowska

 

Anna Pilewicz’s exhibition refers to African rite of female circumcision. The artist pays attention to brutality and humiliation connected with this intervention and she analyses an effect of mechanically caught on ideology. It evokes all negative occurrences related to patriarchal culture: hierarchy, abuse of power, violence, rationalisation. 

Anna Pilewicz’s work involves poetry, videos, graphics. 

Anna Pilewicz graduated from polish philology in Nicolas Copernicus University in Toruń. She makes videos, poetry, paintings and graphics. She is interested in interdisciplinary studies between art, literature and music.

 

 

 

Maciek Duchowski graduated from the Faculty of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (2005) and the Dutch Art Institute in Enschede in Holland (2008). He mainly paints, but he also draws, photographs and makes video art. In Wozownia Art Gallery he presents his new paintings in which he applies pictures taken from the television screen on the painted surface. The artist claims that painting makes sense when its form creates a pre-reflexive order and it isn’t secondary to words or notions. He perceives a painting as a field of disturbance in the presence of conventional ways of seeing produced by mass media.

 

 

 

 

 

Escalation is going to run into the safe space. A powerful energy destroys every barrier, but it breaks itself as well. A stable form disappears, torn to pieces. The unusual process based on a tension, compulsion, dynamic expansion and… a fracture is indispensable, purifying. 

Sylwia Galon’s installation captures a moment of the escalation, explosion. The artist questions an issue of culminating point, possibility of showing very short periods of time. It is a part of visual culture, comic stories. Escalation is a project prepared for Wozownia Art Gallery. 

 

Sylwia Galon, 

Born in 1986. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Dutch Art Institut in Hollland. She makes videos, installations, public art. She lives and works in Gdańsk. 
 

The theme running through the intriguing photographs of Natalia Jaskula is the space being the borderline between reality and fantasy. Their unique mood, shaped by the appropriate light, and also the sophisticated requisites and costumes in which the Artist disguises her characters.  We come across elaborately composed flower bouquets in her photographs, like in the pictures of Jan Brueghel the Elder (nicknamed Velvet), who could capture their beauty, and at the same time induce the observers to the after-thought on the transience and fragility of existence. The mysterious gardens, abounding in luxuriant vegetation – modern paradises – curved from the works of Fragonard, Boucher and other Rococo painters. All these quotations with the references to the melancholy motif, bring out the feeling of associations with the well-known, yet so far inconceivable world – the reality seemingly true, yet unusual. Natalia Jaskula’s photographs refer to Kamp’s  esthetics, which is distinguished by – as  Susan Sonntag put it in „Notes on Kamp” (1964) – artificiality, theatricalness, irony, exaggeration, stylization and distance to reality.

 

 

German artists present in Wozownia their recent works. Ute Seifert i Oliver Voigt create projects involving an artistic strategy based on process and interaction. Their works reflect an interest in passing of time, transition, transformation and a journey experience. 

Ute Seifert displays works focused on basic anthropological issues: relation between nature and civilization, linear and circular interpreting of time. The artist often uses natural materials (flower petals, water) and she explores a symbolic dimension of a decay that they come under. She also applies transparent substances (water, foil, plastic wire). Their ambiguous, unstable ontology inspires reflection on time and process: in work “Silent Waters”, a liquid trembles delicately what reveals it’s hidden energy, it’s potential of change. 

Oliver Voigt focuses on the issue of identity and otherness. The artist impersonates other people in order to visualize a general difficulty of adapting to new circumstances. In photographic series „It is not easy to be you” he photographs himself  as a representative of divers professions. A series „It’s not easy to be a Tourist” shows the artist-tourist, who tries to adjust his behavior to the exotic surrounding. 

Oliver Voigt artistic interests include an analysis of photographic medium. He studies conditionings of creating a photographic testimony. He treats photography as an activity documenting “otherness” and he observes cultural diversities in interpreting photographic picture. 

 

 

The artist in his show uses divers formal solutions to consider certain phonetic and geometric syntax. The gallery space becomes a laboratory in which Matusewicz recreates missing meanings and he studies fragments and a whole and special connotations of the word Europe. The exhibition presents sculptural objects called “Obiektony”, architectonic mock-ups in 3D and an installation involved with the surrounding.

 

  

Wozownia Art Gallery in cooperation with the Malbork Castle Museum displays an exhibition of exlibris, presenting the works of the winners of the biennial competition for the best dedicated ex libris artwork.
 

The Biennial was first launched with a bookplate competition for the newly founded Castle Library. Its initiator was Henryk Raczyniewski, the then director of the Malbork Museum. Following the initiative of a prominent graphic artist Wojciech Jakubowski, the competition soon evolved to a presentation of achievements by top Polish and foreign artists of the genre. The first edition of the competition also marked the start of the regular Malbork Biennial and the Malbork collection of exlibris.

The many-year history of the Malbork Exlibris Biennial demonstrates the big changes that have swept the genre. From unexpansive lettered inscriptions on bookplates indicating the books’ owners in the 1960s and 1970s, the ex libris art has evolved to fascinating, varied pictures from masterful and diversely etched metal plate cuts involving several graphic techniques per print. The evolution of ex libris has elevated the art above its pure utility value (as stickers in books) to the rank of miniature art works in their own right and hence precious collectors’ items and exhibits.
 

 

 

 

Adriana Lisowska’s ( In)nocent Dreams invite the viewer to the world of women fantasies – banal, insane, ecstatic, dangerous, tabuised. The artist presents a femininity devoid of nuances, metaphors and allusions. She uses a literal, “sticky” visual language. She asks extremely difficult, embarrassing, but important questions. Lisowska refers to the pejorative characteristics of femininity and she turns them into positive meanings. Issues that used to be rejected, treated as banal, become valuable. Nature (femininity) invades culture (masculinity), pointing out its lie. 

 

 Adriana Lisowska

She sculpts, photographs and makes experimental jewelry. She graduated from the Department of Fabric and Garment at the Fine Arts Academy in Łódź. She takes part in the designing group LIS2. 

 

 

 

The project derives from a fascination with a technology, which enables an interaction with a surrounding simulated by computer. A title of the project refers to the idea of immersion, typical of the virtual reality (The immersion is an illusion of a sensual participation in the virtual world). Izabela Retkowska visualizes and documents spatial effects – worlds-images created in the reality of graphics programs. The Immersions, in artist opinion, are sort of photographs taken in the virtual space. The project is a new way of defining her experiences in domain of graphics. 

 

Izabella Retkowska, graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the Nicolas Copernicus University in Toruń, where she works as a lecturer. 

 

 

Tomasz Matusewicz, Krzysztof Mazur, Bogdan Wajberg
Wherever You Are ...
4 - 27.11. 2011
curated by: Krzysztof Mazur
 

Wherever You Are... is a title of a project developed by three artists, who stem from divers artistic and academic communities. Here are Tomasz Matusewicz from Poznań, Krzysztof Mazur from Toruń and Bogdan Wajberg from Łódź. The authors do not tend to establish any particular idea, but they assume an artistic adventure based on meeting of artistic individualities.
Wherever You Are... isn't a question or a statement. It opens a possibility of marking places and positions in spatial and geographical relations. It creates a situational space of experience and it involves process.
The project presented in Wozownia was prepared in a farm placed in Biskupice, near Toruń.
 
Krzysztof Mazur, graduated from The Department of Fine Arts at UMK in Toruń, where he works. He run the Atelier of Sculpture II. He run for several years the Foundation of Artistic Practices.
Tomasz Matusewicz, graduated from the Department of Painting, Graphic Art and Sculpture at the PWSSP in Poznań, he works at the Faculty of Painting, Drawing and Visual Arts at the Department of Architecture at the Polytechnic in Poznań.

Bogdan Wajberg, graduated from the Department of Painting and Graphic Art at the PWSSP in Łódź, he works at the Department of Visual Education, Faculty of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź.

 

14.10. - 13.11.2011
 

Curated by: Marta Smolińska

 

The marvel of Sophia Pompéry’s works results from her interest in physical and optical phenomena. In many ways her video works come into a dialog with painting, its condition and tradition of imaging. They are characterised by a fascinating picturesque quality and a subtly arranged visual side, evoking a secret and oneiric atmosphere, guiding the viewer into a state of concentration close to meditation or even hypnotic enchantment. They are exquisite, self-contained, calm, focusing on a selected issue and perfectly arranged – they strike with simplicity of visual means resulting in the disclosure of multi-thread, complex meanings oscillating between physical and artistic reality.