Act 01 — The catalogue

The works,
one by one.

Wood, bronze and stone; then the pastels and the watercolours. Here the works of the archive can be leafed through one by one: each entry opens a page with the year, the material, the dimensions and the place where the work is kept.

«Pomnik Nauczycieli Tajnego Nauczania 1939–1945» (2000), granite and black granite — a work by Antonina Wysocka-Jonczak
The work in its place

The monument to the clandestine teachers

In Park Kazimierzowski, Warsaw, two slabs of granite stand open like the pages of a book. A square window, cut clean through, pierces the left-hand page, and inside the window stands, in black granite, the sign of Fighting Poland. The window is the signal: during the occupation, lessons were held in private homes, and an object moved on a windowsill told the pupils whether it was safe to come.

The Pomnik Nauczycieli Tajnego Nauczania is the sculptor’s homage to the teachers of the clandestine schooling of 1939–1945, set in the park in the autumn of 2000.

AW.S.0119 Pomnik Nauczycieli Tajnego Nauczania 1939–1945 Enter the monographic room →
01

The monographic rooms

The works around which the archive has been built: the great wooden pieces, the stones carved at open-air symposia, the public monuments. Each has its own room, with the story, the worksite and the documents.

02

Painting

Why a sculptor paints

Not everything she made is sculpture. The archive holds a hundred and thirty-seven paintings — mostly pastels, then watercolours and a few canvases. They are not a margin of the work, and they do not come after it: they come first.

The first picture she paints, as a child, is a hidden one. She takes the small framed pictures down from the walls at home, turns them over and paints on the back: animals, landscapes, dolls. Then she hangs them back in their place, right side out.

Jako mała dziewczynka zdejmowała ze ścian obrazki i na ich odwrocie malowała zwierzęta, krajobrazy, lalki. Potem wieszała je na miejsce. Przez dłuższy czas rodzice byli nieświadomi, że pod ich dachem rozkwita artystyczna dusza.

As a little girl she would take the pictures down from the walls and paint on their backs — animals, landscapes, dolls. Then she would hang them back in place. For a long time her parents had no idea that an artist’s soul was blossoming under their roof.

Jolanta Krasnowska, “Antonina od aniołów”, Echo Katolickie, 2009

When her parents find out, they enrol her in the drawing classes of the scouts’ house in Stargard; in seventh grade one of her teachers says she has talent and should try the art school in Szczecin. Five years later she enters the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw at her first attempt, and leaves it a sculptor, with the diploma of 1966. The painting was already there, and it never leaves.

In February 1999, at the retrospective at the Galeria Rzeźby in Warsaw, a city daily titles its review “Pastels, and sculptures in mahogany and wood” — the pastels first — and writes that the room holds sculptures and pastels made from the seventies through the nineties. In the same column it lists what she does: outdoor and small-scale sculpture, medallic art, drawing and painting. Four trades, on a single line.

In 2009 she gathers the pastels into a volume and titles it with a single word: “Malarstwo” — painting. On the title page there is one handwritten line: “I dedicate this album to my Son”. And on the opening page she takes on the question her work has always carried with it.

Obojętnie jak się wypowiadamy, poprzez jaką formę, jeżeli wypływa z potrzeby z głębi naszych przemyśleń i odczuć to staje się prawdziwa. […] Chęć malowania ujawniała się w moim życiu zawsze i to czyniłam z radością. Przedstawiam Państwu swoje pastele i inne prace.

It does not matter how we express ourselves, or through what form: if it flows from need, from the depth of our thoughts and feelings, then it becomes true. […] The urge to paint has shown itself all my life, and I have followed it with joy. I present to you my pastels and other works.

Antonina Wysocka-Jonczak, artist’s statement in “Malarstwo”, Warsaw 2009

The form is indifferent; what matters is that it comes from need. It is what she had always said of wood and stone, said this time of paper — and instead of answering the question, it removes it. In these pages there are not two artists, one who sculpts and one who paints: there is a single hand which, before a block or before a sheet, is after the same thing.

Usually, where the two meet, one imagines the painting coming second — the idea is born in the block, and the sheet runs after it. At least once it went the other way, and it can be shown. In 1981 she paints a canvas titled “Dziecko” — child: a dark mass opening into an almond-shaped hollow, and in the hollow a child curled up on a cloth. The following year she casts a bronze with the same title, and the disc opens the same way around the same figure.

That device — a volume that opens and holds someone within — is not born there. It is born in a park in Płock in 1970, where three masses of mahogany rest on the earth and one parts around a seated child; and from there it runs through forty years — in the sphere that opens on the newborn, in the disc that waits for one, in the bronze books that lock with a key. What 1981 proves is something else: that at one point of that long chain, the hand reached the canvas first.

Maki — kompozycja: four red poppies on thin stems, with blue leaves, on a light, faintly veiled ground
Maki — kompozycja Poppies, a composition · 1996
Oczy: an orange vase from which a bare arm bends down towards the ground, in a green meadow scattered with open eyes and a clock, under a turquoise sky
Oczy Eyes · 1981
Alberta Archanioł Rafał: a great angel figure with gold, densely hatched wings, filling the whole sheet against a night ground
Alberta Archanioł Rafał Albert’s Archangel Raphael · 2000
Zatrzymane w Pamięci — Droga: two shadow figures flanking a luminous threshold, in a room whose walls are drawn in dense blue hatching
Zatrzymane w Pamięci — Droga Held in memory — The road · 2006
Latawiec: a kite like a box of concentric frames sinking towards a yellow core, on a dark grey ground, its string running down to the lower edge
Latawiec Kite · 1997

The site shows the works it has something to say about: a photograph that holds up and, behind it, a story — a room, an exhibition, a tie to another work. The others stay in the archive, and will get their page as soon as what is missing turns up.

A vocabulary of forms The series Open the section Available works Loans and exhibitions Open the section