Hiroszima

Four tall boards of walnut, standing side by side; in each of them a human figure has been taken away, not added. What is seen is the void the figure has left — a silhouette cut clean through the thickness of the wood, which depending on the light reads as a body or as an absence.

It is the shape of a precise fact. At Hiroshima, after the explosion, the shadows of the people who had been vaporised remained on the surfaces: the artist presses those traces into the grain of the wood and makes negatives of figures out of them — which, as the critics wrote, cry out their tragedy more loudly than any gesture.

The sculpture does not come from a commission. These are the years when the theme of martyrdom is everywhere, and the artist tells it in her own words in an interview of 2009: so as not to make an «Auschwitz» she thought of Hiroshima — there too there was dying, there too the victims of a war, and through the annihilation of a human being that distant place became close to her. The group is of 1969, the year after the Exile, and the first exhibition that documents it is the Warsaw solo show of 1974.