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.
 

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.

 

Art Laboratory 2011. Big Deal!

curated by: Maria Niemyjska

 

 

Cezary Klimaszewski’s exhibition is a one before last presentation in a cycle Art Laboratory 2011. The cycle is focused on the issue of minimization in art. The show is a continuation of a project A Good Piece of Advice, which was primary presented in The Biała Gallery in Lublin. The artist in his work refers to the Juliusz Słowacki housing estate in Lublin, which is an implementation of Open Form idea, developed by Oskar Hansen. Klimaszewski created a model of an underground church in a place of the destructed community center. The project reconciles the requirements of a sacred space with an already violated Open Form idea.

 

Born in 1971. He graduated from the Fine Arts Department at the UMCS in Lublin, where he currently works as a lecturer. He co-operates with Tomasz Kozak and Tomasz Malec, who form the Pavilion of Stable Form art collective. He often creates mock-ups and scaled-down objects, reviving divers historic contexts and provoking an active confrontation with them.

 

 

Curated by: Anna Grabowska-Konwent

 

etc., etc. My roots are in my record player!”
                                                                                    Niklaus Troxler

 

 

For the first time, amongst selected personalities from the world of poster we present a person, to which the title ‘persona’ can be simultaneously assigned in two blending disciplines. It is hard to decide what dominates in activities of Niklaus Troxler, his function as an organiser and a propagator of jazz concerts or a poster designer, as those two spheres coexist from the beginning of his work.

Troxler was born soon after World War II in Willisau, a small town blended into the typical Swiss rural landscape associated with serenity where he still lives and works until this day. He grew up in a large, musical family. In 1971 he graduated as a graphic designer from Schule fur Gestaltung in Lucerne and left for Paris to work at the Hollenstein Creation studio. One year in a big city was sufficient for him to form personal relations with jazz musicians, which probably was not so difficult, but the idea of bringing them to an unknown small Willisau was a big challenge. Troxler learnt design principles based on a logical and mathematical approach to composition, in which power of expression and transfer of information are fundamental, principles which were most often based on geometrical divisions of the image plane, simple sans serif fonts and, increasingly, on the photographic medium. Troxler, however, went a different way. In his extensive portfolio (over 300 posters designed for the last 40 years) we can find works notably diverse in style. They can be divided in three main classes: illustrative, typographic and abstract posters, creation of which is not connected to any specific subjects or periods. It can be noticed, of course, that illustrative posters dominated in 1970s and 1980s, and purely typographic and abstract ones started to appear since 1990s, but even here we can find exceptions. It is worth emphasising that Troxler creates some formal series of works, therefore he uses the same composition idea in different posters, reworking it and creating its new variants. Although Troxler designs not only jazz but also theatre, political and social posters as well as examples of visual identification – it is his music posters, where he reaches masterly results and has not found his match for many years, that will certainly remain in the history of graphic design.

 

 

Born on 1 May 1947 in Willisau. From 1963, he underwent an internship as a typographer. From 1967 to 1971, he studied graphic design at Schule fur Gestaltung in Lucerne. After studies, he held a position of an art director at the Hollenstein Creation studio in Paris from 1971 to 1972. Since 1973 on he has been managing his own graphic design studio in his hometown of Willisau. In 1966 he started organising jazz concerts in Willisau, and since 1975 on, Willisau Jazz Festival, which he initiated and organised, has taken place every year. He has designed posters for each edition of the festival. Moreover, he designs record covers, books and magazines, packaging and interior designs. In 1998, he became a professor at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Stuttgart, Member of: the AGI, ADC Switzerland, SGV.

 

 

Exhibition is an assemble of Jakubowska'€™s graphic works focused on subject of danger, menace, risk. It consists of large linocuts, rich in details and filled with symbolic meanings. Teresa Jakubowska, one of the greatest graphic artists in Poland, speaks in her works about dreams and arrangements , but also about impossibilities of fruition them. Basically, she touches human problems in a very universal way. Her graphic works often show lonely, individual figure surrounded by indifferent crowd of people. Artist uses her technique (linocut) to show social and political problems. Works like €œPlace on top€, €œHolding Back€ or Crossing speaks about indifference, persistence and long-standing battle of one'€™s own place in the world. First of all, Jakubowska’s works refer to the situations experienced by herself. The artist in her exhibition „tries to move viewers inside of her graphics, invites them to share emotions connected with danger which is created by ourselves.

 

Teresa Jakubowska was born in 1930 in Wilno. She chose artistic studies in Toruń in order to develop her observation skill. During her studies she differed from rest of the students, because of her stubbornness – she didn’t agree on conservative system of teaching. She got her diploma on Faculty of Arts in Nicolaus Copernicus University in 1953. The artist got many awards and distinctions, moreover her works arose interest in Poland and abroad.

 

 

Curated by: Katarzyna Lewandowska

 

Ania Lucid'€™s exhibition belongs to the cycle €žDebuts€ which presents young polish artists, just entering  the art market. The artist in FEMININE demythologizes women'€™s portrait. In  photographs of naked women she shows femininity private, everyday and extremely corporeal.  It leads to the deconstruction of an archetype of present-day goodness, which media, advertisement and fashion ph