Drawing: Form - Note - Essence

Paper is one of the most important media in art, if not the most essential material in creative work. Thoughts and ideas first take shape on paper, which allows for noting, sketching, and experimenting, but over time it also becomes the ultimate means of expression for many artists. This exhibition combines four historical artists who formed the pillars of Polish art in the second half of the 20th century with four contemporary artists.

Tadeusz Kantor and Roman Owidzki were the artists who effectively paved the way for the astablishment of the Foksal Gallery in 1966 and provided their works for the inaugural exhibition. Kantor is present at the exhibition at the Szydłowski Gallery in two aspects, namely as a multidimensional artist, a painter and a theater creator, whose imagination often operated with scenes, and whose pictures turned into key scenes of the theater, and vice versa, the theater was nourishment for the picture. The second insight into Kantor's work is a drawing from the "Embalages" series from the 1960s, which showcase the artist as a philosopher and pioneer of art.

Roman Owidzki, despite his extraordinary sensitivity, erudition, and talent, and perhaps due to his temperament, was primarily influential as a teacher and mentor to generations of artists and curators. Nevertheless, his works reveal a way of thinking about the image as structure and insist on the formal rigor of composition, which historically had a powerful significance in the world, but also today, in the age of post-digital, becomes relevant as a point of reference and a tension between precision and imperfection, freehand virtuosity and chance.

Erna Rosenstein was one of the most interesting figures in the history of Polish art, and in the last two decades in particular she has gained wide international recognition. Rosenstein was strongly associated with the late avant-garde, which liberated painting from figurative representation. Her drawings are organically composed, creating suspended spaces of moods and forming a kind of parallel poetic to the poems she wrote throughout her life.

Wojciech Fangorovershadows all other 20th-century artists from Poland with his enormous body of work and influence on art worldwide. For this exhibition, we have selected his works from the 1950s. The "Albanian Baskets" reveal a search for visual motifs leading to abstraction, while the male head represents an exploration of the possibilities of the portraiture in the post-war period, when the aesthetics of Cubism are no longer a formal game, but become a clear symbol of the mutilation of humanistic values ​​and bring to mind contemporary art that is critical of war and colonialism, such as Kader Attia's sculptures of distorted heads.

Nunzio De Martino, one of four contemporary artists featured in the exhibition, referes in a completely different way to the metaphors of scars and pain, but also—more broadly—to traces that accumulate in memory, as he uses a sewing machine and thread to compose drawings from multiple layers of paper, literally creating palimpsests. His works evoke writing and lost texts, as well as the beauty of the abstract image. They are particularly close to Kantor's "Emballages," but they also share similarities with Owidzki's pen drawings, elements from Fangor's drawings, and finally, with Elsner's work, in which each line seems like a stitch on the surface of the paper.

The presence of color has been deliberately reduced in the works on display, with the exception of Sławomir Elsner's drawing. This makes its presence more pronounced, emphasizing the importance of the afterimage of memory, achived by
blurring another artist's work as an image of an image. Elsner's drawing is saturated with the intensity of colors and temperatures of the master's work from the past, but the contours and details have been blurred. Elsner based this drawing on Edouard Manet's bouquet of flowers from around 1882 (Oeillets et clématite dans un vase de cristal).

Katarzyna Wiesiołek's technique is also unique, as she applies dry pigment to specially prepared paper using brushes, sponges, and spatulas. This method, which the artist has mastered to perfection, allows her to achieve a visual richness and depth of color that is extremely rare on paper. Chromatic transitions through gradients and subtle color combinations give the landscapes the appearance of abstract paintings with astonishing, dreamlike intensity. Her sensitivity and exploration bring her very close to Fangor and Elsner, whom we have already mentioned.

The imaginary space of tension, suspended history, and, more generally, the drama inherent in Rosenstein and Kantor's drawings strongly resonates with Chloe Piene's drawings. Her works, executed in charcoal on vellum paper, are charged with raw gestural energy. The trace of her charcoal reveals just enough to feel the vibration of hidden structure, probing the boundaries of the human form.