Danuta Lewandowska

Danuta Lewandowska (1927, Warsaw - 1977, Warsaw) was a painter, interior architect and designer. In 1950-1955 she studied at the Faculty of Interior Architecture of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, under Jerzy Sołtan and Kazimierz Nita among others; from 1958 she was a lecturer there, and from 1973 an assistant professor in the Studio of the Composition of Solids and Planes of Professor Roman Owidzki at the Faculty of Painting. She designed interiors and furniture (including the interior of the Baj Theatre), collaborated with the „Ład” Artists' Cooperative and functioned in the intellectual milieu of the leading Polish artists, being friends with Henryk Stażewski.

In the early 1960s she created monochrome, abstract relief-paintings in a dark, greyish range; in the next stage she enriched their texture, inspired by nature and craft (the surfaces of plants, the weaves of wicker). The apogee of her work falls in the years 1974-1977, when she created two-plane compositions: in front of the surface of a painted board the artist fixed a further plane of stretched and painted nylon and metal strings, usually with an abstract oval contrasting with the background.

Thanks to the mobility and the play of the strings, Lewandowska achieved unique, shimmering visual effects, dependent on the intensity of the light and the viewer's point of view - her work is marked by a pioneering approach to the problems of space and movement in the image, close to kinetic art. She was given solo exhibitions at the Gallery of Modern Art in Warsaw (1965) and the Zapiecek Gallery (1976), and after her death - a show at the Zachęta (1982). Her works are held, among others, in the collections of the National Museum in Warsaw and the Museum of Art in Łódź.