Roma Hałat

Romana „Roma” Hałat (1937, Bydgoszcz - 2012, Łódź) was a painter and graphic artist, for years associated as a lecturer with the Władysław Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź. In 1955 she began her studies at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź, in the painting studio of Professor Stefan Wegner. Her creative path, growing out of the tradition of the Łódź avant-garde, was a consistent exploration of the limits of the image.

At the beginning of the 1970s - together with Andrzej Szewczyk - she painted using the rollers of „house painters” with cut-out patterns, treating painting as „an activity in itself” and experimentally rejecting the individual gesture. Successive cycles came into being: „Butterflies and Dragonflies”, „Epitaph for a Poet”, the „Landscapes” based on the blade of a leaf, and the „White Magic” drawings created by the method of automatic notation. The threads of literature and calligraphy also recurred in her art - the conventions of writing became carriers of content and emotion.

From 1985 Hałat created the „Triads” - works on the border of drawing and painting, in which each composition consists of three layers laid upon one another. The cut-out rhythms opened a view into fragments of the inner layers, always remaining a hidden mystery; what would be revealed was decided by chance. The cycles of „Triads” - „El Castillo”, „Rhythms of Good Fortune”, „Meditations” - combined rigour with meditative focus. She presented her works at 25 solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad (including in Vienna and Barcelona); her works are held, among others, in the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.