Zofia Artymowska

Zofia Artymowska (1923, Kraków – 2000, Warsaw) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1945-1950), receiving her diploma in the studio of Eugeniusz Eibisch. After her studies she worked as an assistant, first in Kraków, then at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and from 1971 she taught at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław. She set out from Colourism, but already in the second half of the 1950s she turned towards Constructivism and abstraction.

In 1953-1956, together with her husband Roman Artymowski, she co-created polychromes and sgraffiti on the rebuilt tenement houses of Warsaw's Old and New Town, for which she received the State Award, Second Class (1953) and the Golden Cross of Merit. From 1957 she made non-figurative ceramic mosaics and monotypes, and showed her works at the Krzywe Koło Gallery in Warsaw.

A separate chapter of her biography was the Middle East. During several long stays she taught mural painting and drawing at the university in Baghdad (1959-1960, 1964-1968, 1977-1979) and in Tehran. Thanks to this her geometric abstraction circulated between Warsaw and the world: it was shown from New York to Bogotá.

Artymowska's signature became the „Polyforms” cycle, begun around 1970. The starting point was the solid of the cylinder: the artist multiplied this single module with mathematical precision, shrinking and elongating it, juxtaposing it symmetrically and asymmetrically, changing the colour gently or by contrast. From the replicated unit an illusion of depth and movement was born: painting close to op-art, focused on the pure visual layer, without hidden meanings. In the following decade she developed this language in the cycle „Multiplied Space”.

She showed her works at several dozen solo exhibitions, at the Zachęta in Warsaw (1971, 1984), as well as in Baghdad, New York, Prague and Budapest, and in international surveys from Essen to London. Her works are held, among others, in the National Museums in Warsaw and Kraków, the Museum of Art in Łódź and the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bogotá. Today, as Polish geometric abstraction returns to the centre of collectors' attention, Artymowska's consistent, „calculated” painting is being read anew, as one of its purest voices.