Cycle P.01 — The painted cycles

Anioły

The angels · 2000–2009

Alongside sculpture, the pastel — and in the pastel, from 2000, the angels. Frontal figures with outspread wings filling the sheet, built with dense cross-hatching on nocturnal grounds: the light does not fall on the figures, it is the figure — white and gold thickening until they become body.

They are not church images: they are images of protection, made almost always for someone. Many carry a dedication written into the title, and nearly all have stayed in the homes of the people they were meant for.

01

The reason

Why angels

The beginning of the cycle is on record. Antonina begins painting angels in the years when her son Albert falls ill, and the first sheet is for him: it carries his name in the title, «Alberta Archanioł Rafał», the archangel who in tradition accompanies those who travel and those who heal. The sheet is from 2000 — the year she divides her days between the hospital ward and the Park Kazimierzowski, where she is finishing the monument to the clandestine teachers.

How the motif reaches her, on the other hand, is almost an accident. In a profile a weekly devotes to her in 2009 — the one that calls her «Antonina od aniołów», the Antonina of the angels — the journalist tells how the artist walked by chance into a Warsaw gallery and heard a customer asking for paintings with angels; she said she would try to paint them. It is the journalist, not she, who leaves open the question that closes the passage.

These are also years in which she works stone, and the motif passes from pastel to sculpture: a small standing figure, its head ringed by an arch of light, remains in the marble of the tombstone she makes for her son — the work she will call the hardest of her life.

Dlaczego anioły? Artystka przypadkiem weszła do jednej z warszawskich galerii, gdzie usłyszała rozmowę właścicielki z klientką, która pytała o obrazy z aniołami. Antonina powiedziała, że spróbuje je namalować. A może nie był to przypadek?

Why angels? The artist walked by chance into one of the Warsaw galleries, where she heard the owner talking with a customer who was asking for paintings with angels. Antonina said she would try to paint them. Or was it perhaps not chance?

Jolanta Krasnowska, «Antonina od aniołów», Echo Katolickie, 2009
02

The wall

Six angels, one beside the other. The pastel is always shown in colour: the nocturnal ground, the gold and the white of the wings are the work itself.

03

The dedications

An angel for each

From the first sheet the cycle takes on its nature: an angel is made for someone, and the name of the recipient enters the title, like a destination. The year of the first — 2000 — is written beside the signature.

So the cycle holds an angel for Jacopo and one for Simona, painted in that same year, 2005, and a second Archangel Raphael, Teresa’s. They are sheets that have stayed in the homes they were born for.

The last ones are from the end of the decade: full-figure angels, frontal, their wings spread to embrace the whole sheet. By then the weekly’s epithet has already become the name she goes by.

And it is in the last year of the cycle, 2009, that she gathers the pastels into a volume and titles it simply «Malarstwo», painting. On the title page there is a single handwritten line: the album is dedicated to her Son. The cycle opens with an angel bearing his name and closes with a book bearing his name.

The dedications written into the titles
  • Alberta Archanioł Rafał Albert’s Archangel Raphael
  • Tereski Archanioł Rafał Teresa’s Archangel Raphael
  • Anioł dla Jacopo an angel for Jacopo
  • Anioł dla Simony an angel for Simona
The worksite of that year The Pomnik Nauczycieli room Open the section A vocabulary of forms All the series Open the section Loans and exhibitions Contact Open the section