Anna Cyronek-Kalinowska

Anna Cyronek-Kalinowska (1919, Częstochowa - 2008, Poznań) was an abstract painter. Even before the war she completed the Industrial and Commercial School in Częstochowa, and in 1950-1955 she studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań, under Eustachy Wasilkowski and Marian Szmańda among others, where she received her diploma with distinction.

In 1956 she joined the Association of Polish Visual Artists and met Tadeusz Kalinowski - an abstract painter and co-founder of the Poznań group 4F+R, who became her husband and had a considerable influence on the development of her style. From the very beginning of her activity Cyronek-Kalinowska aligned herself with the painterly avant-garde and devoted almost all her work to abstraction, treating it - as she said - as a creation bound up with the intellect and as „full freedom”, the form of art most proper to her.

Her path was a consistent evolution within non-representational painting. Setting out from Informel, she strove to create her own, complete concept of the image: in the 1960s she moved within the circle of geometric abstraction, approaching op-art; in the 1970s she passed to free constructions, which in the following decade - in cycles such as „Condensed Forms” - took on a lyrical, soft form. In her later years she returned towards the inspiration of landscape.

By 1992 she had realised nine solo exhibitions and took part in important surveys of Polish art - the March Salons in Zakopane, the „Złote Grono” symposia in Zielona Góra and the Festivals of Contemporary Painting in Szczecin. In 2001 she received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation - one of the most prestigious artistic distinctions in the world, established by Lee Krasner, the widow of Jackson Pollock. Her works are in the collections of the National Museum in Poznań, the Silesian Museum in Katowice and the District Museum in Bydgoszcz, as well as in private collections in Poland, Austria, the USA and France. Today, at a time of the renewed reading of Polish post-war abstraction and of women artists' work, her consistent oeuvre is returning to its rightful place.