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 Wanda Czełkowska: 

Art is not Rest

Curated by 

Matylda Taszycka

Assistant Curator

Antonina Gugała

Performance Program

Joanna Leśnierowska


Please join us for the official opening

 15 July 2023, 15:30–19:00

The exhibition will be on view until 3 December 2023

Wanda Czełkowska, "Temat" ("Theme"), 1970–1971, black & white photography. Courtesy of Wanda Czełkowska Studio; photo: Wanda Czełkowska.

Wanda Czełkowska (1930-2021) was a key figure of the Polish avant-garde whose oeuvre remained almost unnoticed by art history until recently. 

 She started her career near the end of the 1950s in Kraków and played an important role in the development of conceptual art in Poland. Member of the famous Grupa Krakowska, whose other fellows included: Tadeusz Kantor, Tadeusz Brzozowski, Jonasz Stern, Maria Jarema and Erna Rosenstein, she kept her independent voice and never fully committed to the artistic discourse and social life of the group.

Wanda Czełkowska beside her installation "Stół" ("Table", 1968-1971) during 4th Kraków Meetings at the BWA pavilion in Kraków, Poland 1971. Courtesy of Szarota Nowak, photo: Wacław Nowak.

 Those who knew her, often refer to her as someone who treads her own separate path. Unlike her contemporaries Alina Szapocznikow and Magdalena Abakanowicz, her work remains largely unknown outside of Poland.

Czełkowska’s best-known works, a series of sculptures titled Glowy (Heads), demonstrate the artist’s ability to bridge the figurative with the abstract. From early 1970s, she conceived conceptual works of which the installations Table (1968-1971) and Absolute Elimination of Sculpture as a Notion of Shape (1972) are the most monumental examples. Even though she defined herself as a sculptor, she pursued a parallel activity as a painter.

“Exhibition Wokół polskiej rzeźby lat 70. lat 80 (Polish Sculpture of the 1970s and 1980s) at the Centre for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, 1995, photographer unknown. Showing Wanda Czełkowska, Bezwzględne wyeliminowanie rzeźby jako pojęcia kształtu (The Absolute Elimination of Sculpture as a Notion of Shape), 1972; 1995. Courtesy of Wanda Czełkowska Studio; photo: unknown.

This exhibition seeks to interpret Wanda Czelkowska’s practice as in permanent tension between the body, the mind and the space. It offers a nonchronological display with an unprecedented reconstruction of the monumental installation Absolute Elimination of Sculpture as a Notion of Shape (1972–1995) at its core, with a constellation of sculptural, graphic and pictorial works built around this central piece.

The goal of Czelkowska’s first retrospective outside of Poland is to offer a comprehensive overview of her artistic career and an inspiring narrative stressing her original contribution to the development of the afterwar sculpture in Europe.

For the duration of the exhibition, the work Absolute Elimination as a Notion of Shape becomes a platform for a site specific program of performances curated by Joanna Lesnierowska to echo Wanda Czelkowska's exploration of movement.

International press:

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