Wanda Gołkowska

Wanda Gołkowska (1925, Rzeszów - 2013, Wrocław) was a painter, draughtswoman, author of spatial forms and organiser of many artistic actions - one of the precursors of Polish conceptualism and an initiator of the mail-art movement in Poland, whose art is also counted within the circle of geometric abstraction and op-art. In 1946-1951 she studied at the Faculty of Painting of the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław (today the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts), defending her diploma in the studio of Eugeniusz Geppert, whose assistant she became; in parallel she studied Polish philology. She linked her whole career with her alma mater, reaching the title of full professor (1991).

Together with her husband, the artist Jan Chwałczyk, she initiated and organised the artistic life of post-war Wrocław, co-creating the Search for Form and Colour group, and then the Wrocław Group, and helping to shape the most important manifestations of Polish avant-garde art of the second half of the 20th century. In 1965 she took part in the First Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elbląg, where her spatial form still stands today, on Rycerska Street.

The turning point was the exhibition „Open Systems” (1968) at the legendary Wrocław Gallery „Pod Moną Lizą”, run by Jerzy Ludwiński. Gołkowska showed three-dimensional objects - frames with attached wooden blocks and boards with movable elements that the viewer could freely rearrange. Introducing movement and chance into the composition, she called these works „open systems”, in opposition to the closed work, independent of its surroundings and of the changing conditions of perception. The meaning of her work shifted from the realisation of the work to the conceptual process - the „mental concretisation” - which led all the way to purely conceptual works, such as the project „Disapprover” and the World Depository of Artistic Information, and to the „Collections” cycle (Art, Earth, Catalogue, Blue), combining conceptual art with abstraction.

From the end of the 1970s simplicity of means, colour and geometric figures dominated her work; she also returned to nature-inspired landscape. She actively took part in the plein-airs of artists using the „language of geometry” and in the international mail-art movement. In 1953-2006 she took part in about 300 exhibitions, plein-airs and artistic actions and presented over 30 solo exhibitions in Poland and abroad; her works are held, among others, in the National Museum in Wrocław and the Museum of Art in Łódź. Bold in her judgements about art, Gołkowska is today - also on an international scale - one of the key figures of conceptual art and the geometric current.