Aleksandra Jachtoma

Aleksandra Jachtoma (b. 1932 in Barchaczów) is a painter regarded as an outstanding abstractionist. She undertook her artistic studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts (in the studio of Czesław Rzepiński), and then at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, where in 1958 she received her diploma with distinction in the studio of Kazimierz Tomorowicz. In 1963 she was one of the founders of the Warsaw artistic group Rekonesans.

Her creative path is coherent and logical. Her early, strongly coloured canvases remained on the border of abstraction and figuration, close to matter painting. At the end of the 1970s Jachtoma moved towards a warm and geometric abstraction, focused on colour and light. Her painting is characterised by an ascetic, disciplined composition built from condensed, uniform patches; the mathematical rigour in them is softened by the delicacy of colour solutions emanating streaks of light, and the lapidary forms (ovals, rectangles) and the homogeneity of tonality give them a hushed, poetic, almost contemplative character. She often allows the colours to interpenetrate freely, not enclosed by the edge of the canvas.

Jachtoma has taken part in over 80 group and about 30 solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad; in 1972 she stayed in Paris on a scholarship of the Ministry of Culture and Art. She is a laureate of the Award of the Minister of Culture and Art for her lifetime achievement (1987), the C.K. Norwid Award and the Jan Cybis Award (2003). Critics value her paintings for their „impression of depth, of spiritual space and of a richness of colour”, and count the artist herself among the leading figures of Polish post-war abstraction.