Looking Into The Sun. Hanna Orzechowska

Looking Into the Sun. Hanna Orzechowska – exhibition of Studio Gallery in cooperation with Arton Foundation

Opening: 23.09.2024, 6 pm
Exhibition: 24.09.2024–17.11.2024

The exhibition will be open Tuesday-Sunday, from 12 pm to 7 pm.

Organiser: STUDIO theatregallery in Warsaw
Palace of Culture and Science, pl. Defilad 1, Warsaw

Curator: Luiza Nader
Exhibition design: Paulina Tyro-Niezgoda
Production: Ewa Grzebyk, Jakub Antosz, Maria Prokesz, Maria Sobczak
Conservation: Martyna Wilkowska
English text editing: Daniel Malone
Graphic design: Kuki Iwański
PR: Marta Sputowska, Majka Duczyńska
Exhibition and publication partner: Fundacja Arton

This exhibition is devoted to the work of Hanna Orzechowska (1923–2008), from the mid-1940s to 1979, and focuses on the central motif of her artistic practice—looking into the sun’s disk—and considers it as a figure of liminal experience. The sun in the artist’s work transforms from a red sphere warming the body and senses, through blinding luminosity depriving a subject of all perceptual barriers, to a cold star heralding disaster.

Seeing the sun with eyes closed, tracing afterimages under eyelids, but also “seeing with the body,” looking into oneself, creating images of female subjectivity and dreaming, all determine the exhibition in the lower space of Galeria Studio. It includes Orzechowska’s never-before-exhibited afterimage compositions from August 1948, her self-portraits from the 1940s and 1970s, and drawn representations of the female body (c. 1978–79) embedded in sensations of pain and pleasure. Orzechowska, who co-founded Władysław Strzemiński’s artistic circle in the second half of the 1940s, was not only influenced by, but also actively influenced and inspired the author of The Theory of Seeing. In addition to the artist’s afterimage paintings, we present her textual and visual notes from Strzemiński’s lectures at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź from the second half of the 1940s. We also make available to viewers for the first time, the small-scale drawings illustrating transformations of 20th century art, which probably served the author of Theory of Seeing to illustrate his lectures, most of them likely by Strzemiński, others perhaps by Orzechowska and artists so far unidentified.

The upper space of the gallery is devoted to the problem of seeing with eyes open: in the light of day, but also in the blinding light of an exploding sun, in the black glare of a liminal event or experience. The sun in Orzechowska’s works in this part of the exhibition takes on a gray or black color, becoming a “dark glow.” Collages such as Never Again, and “Don’t shoot at…” can be seen as statements on the atrocities of war and an indictment of the Holocaust, and at the same time as artistic dissent in the face of violence that was then happening as part of the anti-Semitic and anti-intelligentsia crackdown of 1968 in Poland. Symbolically ending the exhibition, a collage depicts a black sun reminiscent of a giant eye staring at the unfolding catastrophe of the world, and at the same time experiencing the disintegration and death of subjectivity.

The exhibition is equipped with a documentary annex containing materials from the archives of the artist’s daughter Agata Siecińska, relating to the period of her studies, professional work and the family life of Hanna Orzechowska.

The vast majority of works and archival materials are exhibited here for the first time. We would like to thank Agata Siecińska for her kindness, cooperation, and for providing access to Hanna Orzechowska’s works and documentation.

Subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Fund of the Promotion of Culture – a state purpose fund.

Download the exhibition folder → broszura-wystawy.pdf