Jadwiga Maziarska

Jadwiga Maziarska (1913-2003, Kraków) was a painter and author of objects, collages and prints - regarded as a precursor of matter painting in Poland. She studied at the Alfred Terlecki Private School of Painting (from 1933) and then, in 1934-1939, at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts, under Władysław Jarocki and Ignacy Pieńkowski among others. After the war she joined the Group of Young Visual Artists, and in 1957 - together with Tadeusz Kantor, Maria Jarema and Jonasz Stern - she co-founded the Kraków Group Artistic Association, taking part in all its exhibitions; she was also associated with the Zagłębie Group.

What fascinated Maziarska most was not composition or the palette of colours, but the very surface of the painting. Already from the 1940s she experimented with texture - she applied thick layers of paint, from 1946 introduced fabric appliqués, and from 1954 added stearin to the oil paints (e.g. „The Flaws of Unwritten Poems”, 1954). Her mature, independently worked-out matter painting (shown, among others, at the „Nine” exhibition in 1955) is regarded as some of the first works of Polish structuralism, created in parallel with European explorations.

In the following decades Maziarska consistently modified her abstract language - in the 1970s she sometimes limited the colouring to black and white, only to return to vivid colours in the 1980s and 1990s; „alternation” became a hallmark of her work. In recent years it has been discovered that her abstractions had a reference in a collection of reproductions she built over years, which gave rise to the monographic exhibition „Atlas of the Imagined” (Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, 2009). A laureate of the Jan Cybis Award (2001), she left works in, among others, the National Museums in Kraków, Warsaw and Poznań and the Museum of Art in Łódź.