Presence. Maria Michałowska

Presence. Maria Michałowska

Arton Foundation
Foksal 11/4, Warsaw
April 26–May 25, 2025

Organizers:
Arton Foundation
www.fundacjaarton.pl
Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław
www.okis.pl

Curator: Marika Kuźmicz
Initiators of Maria Michałowska's exhibitions: Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś, Igor Wójcik
Collaboration: Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś, Adam Parol
Graphic design: Agnieszka Probola

"And again the same. An elusive, fading, and lingering presence."

This is how Maciej Gutowski described Maria Michałowska's work in her 1978 catalog, capturing the essence of her artistic practice. The cover features a reproduction from the Presence series – one of the central parts of Michałowska's oeuvre, developed since the mid-1970s. The work consists of a sequence of black-and-white photographs: some depict landscapes, two show the artist herself against a forest backdrop, and one contains the word "presence," highlighting the act of revealing her own image within the work. The other photographs reflect a careful exploration of various locations, documenting grass, forest, water, and rocks, as if the artist were trying to precisely identify the places she found herself in, trying to understand her relationship with the world.

Before this project, in the early 1970s, Michałowska began work on the drawing series Multiplications, Self-portraits (1972), Traces (1972), and Transformations (1973). They are linked by recurring motifs: the outline of a face or the tracing of the artist's hand, reduced to a multiplied sign or line that, through repetition, creates specific aesthetic effects. In these works, Michałowska is both visible and hidden – her presence is paradoxical, reduced to a minimal form. On closer inspection, we also notice the presence of others: her students, friends, and long-time partner Zdzisław Jurkiewicz, whom she invited to co-create the works. In her memoirs, Michałowska recalls inviting various people to her studio, tracing their hands or the outlines of their facial profiles on paper, which resulted in a kind of an intimate diary created with those who shared and shaped her everyday reality.

A distinct approach to her own presence, framed by the passage of time and interactions with others, appears in the work One Week from 1970, created during one of the open-air festivals in Osieki. Michałowska printed enlarged calendar pages and placed them in various locations around the centre where the artists were staying and the surrounding landscape, creating a symbolic and metaphysical image of the relationships we form and which make up our shared existence.

Through the lens of these works, one might also attempt to interpret the current status of Michałowska's practice. Although active for many decades within the Wrocław avant-garde, she never had a retrospective exhibition during her lifetime. Her works, while held in numerous museum collections, are rarely shown. And although her name appears in collective studies on the art of the 1960s and 70s, her oeuvre remains open to interpretation and calls for deeper investigation. The exhibition by the Arton Foundation, organized in collaboration with the Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław, offers such an opportunity – while also contributing to the cataloguing and researching of the artist's private archive.

Maria Michałowska (31 May 1925 – 1 September 2018) was born in Brzeżany (now Berezhany, Ukraine). From 1929 to 1944, she lived with her family in Warsaw, and from 1945 to 1947 in Krakow, where she studied Polish and English philology at the Jagiellonian University. From 1947 she was associated with Wrocław, where she studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1957 under Prof. Eugeniusz Geppert and Prof. Stanisław Pękalski. From 1958, she worked as a teacher in the Department of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture at the Faculty of Architecture of Wrocław Polytechnic (from 1982, she held the position of an associate professor, in 1991 she received the title of professor). In 1965 she joined the Wrocław School (later – Wrocław Group), and after two years she took on the responsibilities of the group's secretary, coordinating exhibitions organized outside Wrocław. For more than five decades, she was an active member of the Wrocław avant-garde milieu. She participated in some of the most important events that were groundbreaking for Polish art, such as the Wrocław '70 Art Symposium, the SP. Conceptual Art exhibition (1970), International Meetings of Artists, Scientists and Art Theorists in Osieki (1967) and Atelier 72 in Edinburgh (1972). She had around a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in many group exhibitions in Poland and abroad.

The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph on the work of Maria Michałowska, edited by Marika Kuźmicz with texts by Marika Kuźmicz, Luiza Nader, Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber, and Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz, published in 2024 by the Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław.

Co-financed from the budget of the Lower Silesian Voivodeship Local Government
The Marshal of the Lower Silesia Region took the honorary patronage of the event