Etiuda

The work is made at a sculpture symposium in the Pole Mokotowskie. The banner stretched over the field says it in full: «Art Konfrontacje — Plener rzeźbiarski. Sztuka w przestrzeni publicznej», art in public space. The sculptors work in the middle of the grass, inside an enclosure of tape, the blocks resting on pallets and people stopping to watch; the sculptures of that edition are unveiled on 26 September 2010, at three in the afternoon, in the park itself. No gallery, no indoor opening: the inauguration is an autumn afternoon on the grass.

Antonina is one of the six sculptors of the edition — the city daily photographs them together on what it calls «the future sculpture square» and names them one by one: Dariusz Kowalski, Teresa Pastuszka-Kowalska, Grzegorz Szkopowicz, Jacek Muldner-Nieckowski, Antonina Wysocka-Jonczak, Wiktor Gajda. At the foot of the finished work a red plate remains, engraved with her name, the title and the name of the event.

It is the last of her open-air worksites, and the closest to home: after Slovakia, Slovenia, Germany, Austria, Sardinia and the Apennines, the last block she opens is in Warsaw, in a park where people walk the dog.

And the form is the form of a cut. The two edges that face one another correspond wave for wave: where one draws back the other stands proud, and between them a fissure of light remains as wide as a hand. But the line is no accidental fracture, it is drawn — on the one it descends in broad, regular waves, on the other it takes them up in the negative. The outer faces are worked with a close point, rough and even; the inner profiles are the clean part, the part one looks at. Whoever walks past them sees two figures facing one another; whoever walks around them sees a single thing, reopened.