Alina Ślesińska

Alina Ślesińska (1922, Poznań - 1994, Warsaw) was a sculptor, and also a painter, graphic artist and creator of artistic textile. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków under Xawery Dunikowski, and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under Marian Wnuk. The second half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s mark the period of her greatest career and international fame - in 1957 she left on a scholarship to Paris, where Jean Cassou organised an exhibition for her, and soon she was also showing her works in London.

After early sculptures referring to the historic buildings of Warsaw, under the influence of the work of Henry Moore Ślesińska turned towards an increasingly allusive biomorphic sculpture. Her most important idea, however, became the blurring of the boundary between sculptural form and architectural design - in the cycles „Proposals / Designs for Architecture” she sketched visionary, large-scale concepts („Bridge”, „Church”, „Stadium”, „Two-level City”), recalling the utopian projects of the avant-garde and the futurological visions of science-fiction films. „Why must houses always be boxes?”, she asked, postulating a functional sculpture, close to the idea of the Hansens' „Open Form”.

In 1963, as one of two women, she exhibited at the 3rd Biennale in Paris alongside Gaudí and Eero Saarinen, and a bronze cast of the „Two-level City” entered the sculpture park in Otterlo in the Netherlands; at the end of that year she went to Ghana to make a monumental monument to President Kwame Nkrumah. After around 1967 Ślesińska disappeared from view and died forgotten - her work was recalled only by posthumous exhibitions, including „Alina Ślesińska” at the Zachęta and „Sketches of Space” at the Museum of Sculpture in the Królikarnia.