Gallery 2
6.02 - 14.03.1999
 Exhibition opening, from left: Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Wojciech Krukowski. Photo Marek Grygiel | Krzysztof M. Bednarski, Italian Shoes Passsage Passaggio Scarpe italiane retrospective exhibition, sculpture, installation --- Curator: Wojciech Krukowski --- Co-operation: Marta Pejda Exhibition opening 5.02, 6 p.m. |
Krzysztof M. Bednarski was born in Cracow on July 25, 1953. He has lived and worked in Italy since mid-1980s, maintaining permanent ties with his homeland. He studied at the Sculpture Faculty of Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts in 1973-1978. From 1975, he participated in Jerzy Grotowski's post-theatre performances and designed posters for these projects. His diploma work The Total Portrait of Karl Marx (1978), an open mockery of this communist ideologist, became one of the boldest political statements in art before Polish August 1980.
In 1978-1986, the artist attended a number of sculpture symposia in Poland and abroad, including in Carrara (1982 and 1985), where he developed interest in metaphors and symbols of commonly readable signs (e.g. the 1983 marble sculpture Victoria-Victoria, the huge hand with the V sign and cut fingers, was regarded as the visual equivalent of a social mood in Poland under martial law). His journey to equatorial Africa in 1986 and ensuing experience of personal transformation was a boundary moment in Bednarski's work. From 1986, he focused in the mainstream of his work on the creation of an own language of visual forms through which he objectified the individual.
Moby Dick, the hull of a boat he happened to find, responding with form and metaphor to Bednarski's exploration, ushered in a new chapter in his artistic life. Moby Dick was presented in several versions since 1987. Visual modules, the solid and openwork pyramids forming spatial stars (sometimes lit with red and blue light), and metal tables of fixed sizes, conveyed meanings of late 1980 installations. The series Vision & Prayer, based on the poetry of Dylan Thomas, that used the form of rhomb and hourglass, further enriched Bednarski's language. Ties with poetry constitute a permanent element in Bednarski's work (cf Silentium Universis of 1984, based on a verse from Wisława Szymborska's poem Conversations with a Stone, Fuga da Bisanzio - a Josif Brodski of 1987, the huge installation Unsichtbar of 1993, inspired by Reiner Maria Rilke's poems).
Another permanent solution in his work is preserving important messages in degraded material (Polish Thanatos of 1984 in memory of his deceased friends from Grotowski's theatre, ecological Baltic Sarcophagus of 1993) or elusive light and shadow. Shadow, thrown by a properly moulded object, produced the work In Memory of Jan Szeliga (1980), and today is the essence of the design of a monument to Federico Fellini in Rimini (designed in 1994, now under construction). In 1976-1977, Bednarski was a visiting professor at Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts. He was granted a 1998 scholarship of Poland's Minister of Culture and Art in recognition of his contribution to the promotion of Polish art abroad, and a 1998-1999 scholarship of Swiss Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri Foundation in Seggiano (Italy).
Maryla Sitkowska