Rysunek: forma – zapis – esencja

Nunzio De Martino, Sławomir Elsner, Wojciech Fangor, Tadeusz Kantor, Roman Owidzki, Chloe Piene, Erna Rosenstein, Katarzyna Wiesiołek

Paper is one of the most important media in art—if not the most fundamental material in artistic practice. Thoughts and imaginings first take form on paper, which enables notation, sketching, and experimentation, yet over time it also becomes, for many artists, a final means of expression. The exhibition brings together four historical artists who form pillars of Polish art of the second half of the twentieth century and four contemporary voices.

Tadeusz Kantor and Roman Owidzki were artists who made the founding of Galeria Foksal in 1966 possible and contributed their works to its inaugural exhibition. Kantor is present in the exhibition at Galeria Szydłowski in two aspects. First, as a multidimensional artist—a painter and theatre maker—whose imagination often operated through scenes; his paintings frequently evolved into key theatrical moments, while theatre itself became nourishment for the image. A second insight into Kantor’s practice is provided by a drawing from the Emballages series from the 1960s, works that stand as the artist’s signature statement as a philosopher and pioneer of art.

Roman Owidzki, by contrast, despite his extraordinary sensitivity, erudition, and talent—perhaps also because of his temperament—was above all influential as a teacher and mentor to generations of artists and curators. His works reveal a way of thinking about the image as a structure and insist on the formal rigor of composition. Historically this approach held immense significance worldwide, and today, in the post-digital era, it again becomes relevant as a point of reference and as a tension between precision and imperfection, between manual virtuosity and chance.

Erna Rosenstein was one of the most fascinating figures in the history of Polish art, gaining broad international recognition particularly in the last two decades. She was strongly connected to the late avant-garde, which liberated the image from figurative representation. Her drawings are composed organically, constructing suspended spaces of mood and forming a kind of parallel poetic world to the poems she wrote throughout her life.

Wojciech Fangor, through the scale of his oeuvre and his influence on global art, eclipses all twentieth-century artists originating from Poland. For the exhibition we selected works from the 1950s. Albanian Baskets reveal a search for visual motifs leading toward abstraction, while Head of a Man explores the possibilities of portraiture in the postwar moment, when the aesthetics of Cubism were no longer merely a formal game but became a clear symbol of the mutilation of humanistic values. The work also evokes contemporary art critical of war and colonialism, such as the sculptures of distorted heads by Kader Attia.

Nunzio De Martino, one of the four contemporary artists presented in the exhibition, refers in a very different way to the metaphors of scars and pain, but also—more broadly—to the traces deposited in memory. He uses a sewing machine and thread to compose drawings from multiple layers of paper, literally creating palimpsests. His works simultaneously evoke writing and lost texts, as well as the beauty of abstract imagery. They resonate particularly with Kantor’s Emballages, but also formally connect with Owidzki’s pen drawings, elements found in Fangor’s works, and with Elsner’s drawing, in which every line appears almost like a stitch on the surface of the paper.

The presence of color in the exhibition has been deliberately reduced in the presented works—with the exception of a drawing by Sławomir Elsner. Through contrast, its presence becomes more pronounced and additionally highlights the significance of his gesture of representing another artist’s image in a blurred manner—an image of an image, as if seen in the afterimage of memory. His drawings are saturated with the intense colors and the temperature of a master’s work from the past, yet their contours and details have been softened. Elsner based this drawing on Édouard Manet’s bouquet of flowers from around 1882 (Oeillets et clématite dans un vase de cristal).

Katarzyna Wiesiołek also employs a distinctive technique, applying dry pigment to specially prepared paper using brushes, sponges, and palette knives. This method, mastered to perfection by the artist, allows her to achieve a richness and depth of color rarely encountered in works on paper. Chromatic transitions through gradients and subtle combinations of colors make the depicted landscapes appear like abstract paintings of astonishing, almost dreamlike intensity. Her sensibility and artistic search place her close to Fangor and Elsner, already mentioned above.

The dimension of imagined space, moments of tension, suspended narratives, and—more broadly—the dramatic quality of Rosenstein’s and Kantor’s drawings strongly resonates with the works of Chloe Piene. Her drawings, made with charcoal on drafting paper (vellum), radiate the raw energy of gesture. The trace of charcoal allows the viewer to sense a hidden structure while probing the limits of representing the human form.