Three Things I Love in Life: the Car, Liquor, and Sailors

WHEN: 18 June 2021 — 15 September 2021

WHERE: lokal_30 gallery, Wilcza 29a/12, 00—544 Warsaw, Arton Foundation, Foksal 11/4, 00-372 Warsaw

ARTISTS: Helena Bukowska, Krystyna Dydyńska, Wiktoria Goryńska, Julia Keilowa, Janina Konarska, Julia Kotarbińska, Bogna Krasnodębska–Gardowska, Janina Kłopocka, Elżbieta Malcz–Klewin, Leonia Nadelman/Janecka, Maria Nicz–Borowiakowa, Jadwiga Simon–Pietkiewicz, Resia Schor, Elwira Zachert–Mazurczyk, Wanda Zawidzka–Manteuffel

CURATORS: Dobromiła Dobro, Agnieszka Kalita, Hanna Kraś, Agata Ostrowska, Agata Plater-Zyberk, Katarzyna Trzeciak

Nearly one thousand women students studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in the years 1918–1939. Not all of them most likely felt the same passion for cars, liquor and sailors, but all of them shared the zeal for studying art. They differed in many ways – in terms of their background, social status, views, religion, and often also creative temperament. Some of them fought for their position in the art world, while others settled down by their husbands, abandoned artistic careers or became lost altogether in the war turmoil.

We follow the traces of more than a dozen women students, seeking to investigate their biographies and restore the memory of women who have thus far been denied a deserved place in history.

Three Things I Love in Life: the Car, Liquor, and Sailors is an exhibition organised by women students of the Faculty of Management of Visual Culture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in collaboration with the Arton Foundation and lokal_30 gallery. The show forms part of the international project Not Yet Written Stories: Women Artists’ Archives Online, in which researchers from Poland, Croatia and Latvia study archives of local institutions in search for traces of forgotten women artists.[1] The exhibition at lokal_30 (18 June – 15 September 2021) results from the students’ research in the archive of their alma mater.

The archive of the Academy of Fine Arts has preserved files of as many as 926 women students from the years 1918–1939. However, only some of these artists forged artistic careers that secured them a place in Polish art history. Left after most of them is only a hand-written résumé and an enrolment application stored in an archival file. The exhibition tells the stories of sixteen women students of the Warsaw School of Fine Arts (later renamed the Academy of Fine Arts) from the interwar period. The show seeks to follow their histories by discovering their later fate and reviewing their artistic oeuvre.

The exhibition forms part of the “NOT YET WRITTEN STORIES: WOMEN ARTISTS’ ARCHIVES ON-LINE” project within the Creative Europe programme

Subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Fund for the Promotion of Culture

Media patronage: TVP Kultura, Blok Magazine, Magazyn SZUM