Urszula Broll

Urszula Broll (1930, Katowice – 2020, Przesieka) was a painter and graphic artist, one of the key figures of the 1950s avant-garde and an initiator of Buddhism in Poland. She completed her studies in 1955 at the Katowice branch of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Already during them she met Konrad Swinarski, a student of Władysław Strzemiński, who made fragments of the „Theory of Vision” available to the group.

This reading became the foundation of the St-53 Group (1953-1956), one of the first post-war avant-garde groupings in Poland, of which Broll was a co-founder (the name combined the then Katowice, Stalinogród, with the surname of Strzemiński as master). In her early works she analysed form with constructivist discipline, drawing on Strzemiński and Mondrian. She also painted portraits of Silesian women, cubising still lifes and industrial landscapes of her native Upper Silesia.

In time her path turned towards spirituality. Together with her husband, Andrzej Urbanowicz, from 1960 she ran a studio in Katowice that became an independent centre of culture: a place of meetings, of publishing and translation. It was there that in 1967 the Oneiron Group was born, an esoteric circle of artists (with Henryk Waniek, Antoni Halor and Zygmunt Stuchlik), exploring the nature of dreams, alchemy, symbols and mystical experiences.

Her fascination with the culture and philosophy of the East, especially Zen Buddhism, shaped, from the 1970s, her mature, recognisable style: metaphysical painting and mandalas, treated as records of spiritual transmissions. In 1983 Broll settled permanently in Przesieka in the Karkonosze Mountains, co-founding the first Buddhist community in Poland.

Associated with the Polish neo-avant-garde and the Krzywe Koło Gallery in Warsaw (1959), she exhibited at the 2nd and 3rd Exhibition of Modern Art (1957, 1959) and at the plein-airs in Osieki. Her works are held, among others, in the Museum of Art in Łódź. She died in February 2020, while preparations were under way for her premiere retrospective „Atman Means Breath” at the Królikarnia in Warsaw, an exhibition that recalled the full scale of this distinct, for decades underrated path: from geometric avant-garde to art as a spiritual practice.