Srebro. Orange and Others

Joanna Srebro (1932–2006) was born and raised in Tarnów. She later studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, receiving her diploma in 1962 from the studio of Wacław Taranczewski. After completing her studies, she returned to her hometown, where she lived and worked for the rest of her life. An active participant in the local artistic community, she also took part in numerous exhibitions in Poland and abroad. 

Today, Joanna Srebro is primarily perceived as a local Tarnów artist. Even during her lifetime, there were voices, particularly strong over the past decade, suggesting that an opportunity to develop her career in a larger urban center with a broader artistic community might have brought her far wider, perhaps even nationwide, recognition. Srebro, however, saw herself as a reserved person in need of peace and respite. Competition and the relentless pursuit of career advancement would have been profoundly exhausting. What mattered more was the exploration and development of successive threads within her work, whether thematic or formal.The seemingly limiting context of locality allowed for deep concentration on shaping and articulating a distinctive painterly vision of the world, a coherent, expressive cosmos from which, at different stages of her artistic practice, motifs close to the artist’s heart gradually emerge: a fascination with nature, reflections on the position and role of women in society, philosophical and eschatological themes, among many others.Today, Srebro’s artistic legacy can be viewed as an autonomous whole, rather than solely through the prism of the legend that surrounds her in Tarnów. At the same time, it stands as a record of lived experience and a meditation on universal questions, observations, and reflections concerning the individual within society.

Curator: Maria Prokesz