Furnishings

The inspiration for the exhibition comes from two paintings and two dates: the 1946 painting Szabrownicy (Looters), held in the collection of the National Museum in Poznań, and Umeblowanie (Furnishings) from the artist’s studio, dating to 1949, painted on cardboard and never shown before. Between 1946 and 1949, a new order —the post-war order — takes shape.

The exhibition focuses on the flat-studio of Erna Rosentein (1913-2004), who, after the war, lived in two places in Warsaw: first on Iwicka Street in Lower Mokotów, and from 1965 until her death in 2004 on Karłowicza Street in Upper Mokotów. She shared these places with Artur Sandauer (1913-1989). The studio was made available to us by the artist’s son, Adam Sandauer, who passed away in 2023. In the studio, our attention was drawn to a small work on cardboard, Furnishings, which, compared to artefacts from that period, exuded an unnatural, fairy-tale-like tranquility: a chair, a table, a window, the interior of a furnished room. This work had its counterpart in the well-known painting Looters, a grotesque, shameless depiction of chaotic plundering.

While looking through the items preserved in the studio, we also came across the artist's sketchbooks from the same period. Particularly interesting is a notebook documenting her 1948 trip to Paris, in which the quotidian from Parisian cafés and portraits of her close circle merge with a potent search for a distinct, surreal visual language. The effort to settle into a new reality, saturated with post-war violence, is combined with an effort to find herself in art. The works, sketches, and objects brought from the studio offer an insight into the most intense period of Erna Rosenstein's artistic struggles, which continued until the end of the 1960s.

Striking — and fundamental to these searches for an adequate language — is the poverty, modesty, and fragility of these objects. They seem to be frozen in the process of organic decay. The term relic, a tangible remnant of times past, comes closest to describing their materiality. They are a concrete response to the postulate of Tadeusz Kantor, a close friend of Rosenstein, who claimed that one must exist in the lowest rank of reality to guarantee authentic experience. On the other hand, the concept of the abject, often used in the context of surreal images, also aptly describes them. Its dark, repulsive, misshapen, and subconscious quality is associated with the experience of wartime trauma. From the furnished life, shadows and fragments of dismembered bodies peer out and crawl forth.

The exhibition features two cabinets from the studio, one of which was presented as the focal point at Rosenstein’s exhibition at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in 1967. The second, from the same period but less well known, reveals a painterly quality that tests the language of informel abstraction. In addition, a separate group of works exhibited in 1967 is highlighted — pieces made from plastic remnants: painted emballages wrapped in stockings, belonging to the artist’s most experimental, formless, and awkward objects. The exhibition is completed by a drawing illustrating the severed heads of Rosenstein’s murdered parents, floating in an empty, flat landscape — a source of wartime trauma.

We are also presenting paintings taken from the walls of the artist's apartment by key figures of the Kraków Group (Grupa Krakowska): Jonasz Stern (1904-1988), Maria Jarema (1908- 1958), and Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990). It was with them that Erna Rosenstein co-created the vision of postwar modernity, participating in the First Exhibition of Modern Art in 1948.