Artysta
Maria Michałowska
Biografia
One of the first conceptual artists in Poland. Maria Michałowska - from the circle of the Wrocław Mona Lisa Gallery - in the cycles „Traces” and „Multiplications” explored time, space and repetition as „linear documentations of the traces of reality”.
Maria Michałowska (1925-2018) was a painter, draughtswoman and photographer - one of the first representatives of conceptual art in Poland. She studied at the Faculty of Humanities of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (1945-47), and then at the Faculty of Painting of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław (1951-57). Associated with Wrocław for over five decades, she was a long-time lecturer (from 1991 a professor) at the Faculty of Architecture of the Wrocław University of Technology. From 1967 she co-created the Wrocław Group (with Zdzisław Jurkiewicz, Jan Chwałczyk and Jerzy Rosołowicz among others) and belonged to the circle of the „Pod Moną Lizą” Gallery, close to Jerzy Ludwiński's concept of „impossible art”.
Michałowska's work - although it encompasses painting, drawing, photography and conceptual events - is internally coherent: it is marked by an intellectual structure and rational reflection on the process of creation and on the phenomena of time and space, while at the same time valuing visuality and matter. In her early painting cycle „Disappearing Forms” she contemplated colour as a phenomenon; in the 1970s she began to „appear” in her art, creating the photographic and drawing cycles „Multiplications”, „Multiplications: Self-portraits” (1972), „Traces” (1972) and „Transformations” (1973) - multiplied outlines of the hand and the profile of the face, provoking associations with op-art.
Michałowska took part in events that were breakthroughs for Polish art - the Wrocław '70 Visual Arts Symposium, the exhibition „CA. Conceptual Art” (1970), the Osieki Plein-airs and „Atelier 72” in Edinburgh (1972). In her lifetime only eleven of her solo exhibitions were held; the first monographic presentation of her oeuvre was the exhibition „At the End of This Road Perhaps I Will Find a Mirror” at the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław (2024). Her works are held, among others, in the National Museums in Wrocław, Poznań and Warsaw, the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, the Museum of Art in Łódź and MOCAK.