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The Polish Connection:
The Chicago Athenaeum Part I "The Polish Connection: Contemporary Polish Artists in Chicago" is showing at The Chicago Athenaeum at Schaumburg, Illinois, until September 10, 2000, and it is as great an experience as it is difficult to review. This exhibition gathers twenty artists representing three phalanges: Poles, Polish painters and sculptors living abroad, and a number of Polish-American artists. Each visit to this showing well repays the effort. In an exhibition of this caliber, any review must be inadequate: the art is of high quality, and there is quite a bit to see... more than to which just one visit can do justice. The Chicago Athenaeum at Schaumburg in fact accommodates several exhibitions, of which "The Polish Connection" is just one -- which for the visitor and the collector is Seventh Heaven. The Athenaeum site at 190 South Roselle Road, frankly, looks like a large grey barn, which is perhaps a bit of whimsy on the part of its architects, but it affords ample space for fine art, and allows time and tranquility in which to enjoy it. "The Polish Connection: Contemporary Polish Artists in Chicago" is its own 'Art 2000' on a human scale, albeit with a specific focus. Any overview, however, must be partial and selective, even with every effort to assess all objectively. A beginning... ...May start with Leszek Wyczolkowski, a Polish-born peintre et graveur, who studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Ontario College of Art, Canada. (Wyczolkowski was born in 1950 and emigrated to Canada in 1978.) In a 1996 showing of Wyczolkowski's work, Stuart J. Reid, Curator at the Art Gallery of Mississauga asserted a close kinship between the inspirations of Wyczolkowski and Belgian painter Rene Magritte (1898-1967). Reid observed: "Both artists take great licence with familiar objects, playing with their scale, taking them from their natural context, pointing out their metaphysical being." Reid added that both "...bridge the gap between the abstract and the figurative, lingering in the territory of the surreal." [In forum '99: the art of Leszek Wyczolkowski (The Society for Arts: 1999)].
The Chicago Athenaeum at Schaumburg includes Wyczolkowski's Genesis (1983) and the artist's acrylic and oil on canvas, Research. Genesis does indeed seem a surrealist ideal of biological generation. In Genesis, the central focus is a globular mass composed of numerous smaller spheres which vary within a noticeable range. This collective mass is anchored to a thin, relatively uniform ground by a beaded tether. It is the viewer's exploration of the enigmatic central aggregate which yields a spectrum of possibilities: pearls and breasts, onions, bulbs, creaturely organs, or, perhaps, a mineral illusion of growing life. Whether all or none, Wyczolkowski's Genesis imparts a visceral intimation of seed proceeding into flower. Viewers in the gallery noted how the focus caught the eye immediately, and how they subsequently followed the composition down the tether. The content seems either a gathering about an attractor, or a history of organic evolution. Leszek Wyczolkowski's color scheme in Genesis conceals a vibrant strategy: the general ground is uniformly green, light and yellowish at low horizon and subtly darkening toward canvas top. Yellow infuses the painting as a unifying cast; but within this, the central object's subdued reds yield to soft yellows and glowing off-whites for the upper highlights, and are overmastered by shades of blue, green and brown at what seems an underbelly. As complementary hues, red and green, even where so 'naturalized' as in Genesis, stimulate vision, lending an effect of expectant quivering and fluorescence to the image. Research employs a similar palette, although in this painting the hues are brighter, purer, which befits the sharply defined linework of the central focus: an incomplete sphere. This sphere stands out, Platonic and unworldly, from the naturalistic globes which form a flat landscape at lower canvas. Whether the sphere in Research is in construction, or perhaps even partially dead and dismantled, there is an instinctual 'rightness' to Wyczolkowski's fathoming of the senses and the cerebral, for if indeed our natural inclinations equate living and organic with soft, subtle, and unresolved, then human artifice aspires to clarity, raw extracted values, procedure over process -- in logic, science, technology.... Leszek Wyczolkowski himself observed: "I never give an answer, I let the reaction depend on who sees it." [Quoted in Leszek Wyczolkowski: Paintings and Drawings (Polish Museum of America: 1996).] Truths may hide in fantasies -- the art of Grzegorz Stec confirms the thought. At first sight, one recalls the fantastic scenes of Hieronymus Bosch, the frenzied, busy action, all unreal; and Giovanni Battista Piranesi's labyrinths -- space built from belief: free but plausible. Stec presents an art of 'gut' philosophy; and further still, an art which springs from knowing what to say, uncertain as to words, combined with all the fundamental powers to express. Grzegorz Stec is an living artist who was born in Cracow, Poland. Several of his canvases are on display in "The Polish Connection" at The Chicago Athenaeum/Schaumburg. Each delights.... And this is precisely the artist's intent. Stec declared his strategy in an interview with Ewa Krason:
In Everlasting Fall (1998), the viewer hesitates between the impression of a sacred tree (a center of arcane rites and ritual) or a mushroom cloud (a much more modern god). In place of crowning leaves, there is a storm of brush and paint as acolytes below surround the centered stem. A viewer then decrypts the sweep of figures and the forms below. It is a striking painting. The artist feels and orchestrates, the viewer plays the tune. I really like this work. And there is more... Grzegorz Stec is further represented by the oil on canvas, Star Hunters (29.5"x57":1998). One thinks of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. A visitor comes to experience; and only later dissects his response: the truths still hide within. Stec works within such an awareness. The artist once said: "I do not completely understand light in my paintings, as I do not completely understand myself." [In Exodus or Carnival...]. Star Hunters displays a knowing sweep of brush coupled with a discipline which bows to the artist's inspiration. That the artist, like the viewer, is given much of directed reflection throughout the painting -- and that this is intended -- is explicit in the artist's own words: "Communicating thoughts and emotions to another person is limited. Working with people is an art of self-censorship, whereas working with inanimate objects; paints, canvas, one can afford the expression of all possible emotions, running no risk of inflicting pain on anyone. Taming the elements with an unemotional method is the most satisfying." [In Exodus or Carnival....] A gallery statement from Curator Christopher D. Kamyszew notes of Stec that the artist "courageously defends the cohesiveness of his art against all fleeting fads and currents of modernity that nowadays so frequently terrorize a thinking artist," and Kamyszew adds: "His fantastic imagination...is submitted to the rigorous standards of professionalism." In fact, this is a trait which characterizes many of the otherwise very different artists in "The Polish Connection": High technique, high inspiration, and a vigor of spirit. That latter trait is important. Grzegorz Stec asserted in his interview with Ewa Krason: "The very fact of having undertaken the effort of confronting certain issues is something optimistic in itself. Maybe it's not the easiest of optimisms, yet it is optimism nonetheless." Stec is further exhibiting Artist's Studio (25.5"x49": 1998) and within this painting, the eye vacillates between an intimate sense of close space, an artist's cluttered closet of work, and a Piranesi-esque, almost Baroque feeling of labyrinthine space on a major scale. This is art with content.
The oil and egg tempera paintings of Pawel Zajaczkowski attest to the range and high quality in "The Polish Connection" at the Chicago Athenaeum/Schaumburg. Waiting For The Tune (1993) is both a portrayal of character, and an expert wielding of all the possibilities of the artist's media. The earthy human subject, although disheveled and at ease, reveals a pride and dignity; a quality still further suggested by the cap and military coat. The gilding of the background, resonating to the autumnal yellows and ochres, adds a sense of radiant, iconic light. Waiting For The Tune leaves an impression of ready courage, tarnished by age and awaiting a renewed call to action that will not sound again. Pawel Zajaczkowski's canvases unveil more within their subject each time one looks. This artist is represented by three works, the two others being: Waiting For Coal (50"x40": 2000) and Portrait of a Proud Man (39"x31": 1999). Waiting For Coal portrays a highlander playing a traditional, handcarved mountain pipe. In all these paintings, the artist plays the overt image against the implied context: always there is an act or expectation which awaits 'off-stage.' And 'off-stage' is the provenance of the viewer himself. In these works, one finds an emotional 'je ne sais quoi': invoked, summoned and which will not rest until confronted and resolved. Grazyna Lippert-Zajaczkowska was born in Cracow in 1954, and received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts/Cracow in 1979. She is an artist most noted for her mixed media work employing varying, repeated image. The Year 2000 (60"x72": 2000), her mixed media triptych, here mixes concurrent, but disparate images. Lippert-Zajaczkowska has stated: "In some of my paintings, I adopted the structure of a medieval altar merging external shape of the painting with its internal motif, and its encrusted surface pattern figures." [In Women in Art, (The Polish Museum of America: 1995).] The Year 2000, in form, does draw upon that genre. The central panel of The Year 2000 is an aerial photograph of Chicago's Navy Pier. At left, a bipartite section juxtaposes Polish mountaineers (top half) and peasant homes in winter snowfall (at bottom half). Joined with these, in the panel at right, are images of a Cracovian, medieval church (at top) and below, a swan before the rotunda of a patrician building. The Year 2000, in pure image, brings to mind that each age, whatever innovations it brings to term, nonetheless bears within itself its inheritance and a residue. History is not escaped -- it is lived and it is dealt with. Even society has, as evolutionist Gaylord Simpson once noted, varying rates and tempo of change. It is, as Zajaczkowska's art reveals, the manner in which we grow and yet keep our balances.
Jerzy Kenar was born 1948 in Iwonicz Zdroj, Poland, and has been in the U.S. since 1979. Kenar's work is internationally acclaimed -- the Kenar Studio is in Chicago. Kenar is a sculptor celebrated for a style which contrasts the recalcitrant rigidity of wood and hard steel with sculptural expressions that interweave, ply and wind: an art which evokes pliable ribbons and molded, rather than its own carved and cast, media. And such an art, in its flow of line and mass seemingly contradicts what we know of the materials, intensifying the artist's abstracted ideal. Power of Hate, Kenar's engaging piece in "The Polish Connection," exemplifies what the sculptor once stated in his own epigrammatic verse: "I like to box with the wood - fight with it./ I master it - I form it - I use heavy axes." [Voices From My Childhood (Studio Kenar: Chicago: 1994).] In Power of Hate, the cylindrical body of the sculpture rings around, much as a scorpion tail, to strike its own severed base -- a work which turns in upon itself; as cruel in its theme, as it is captivating in appearance -- which perhaps is an essence of the power of hate. Jerzy Kenar is also represented by two pastels on paper: both titled Flying to Montana; the first is sixty inches by eighty inches (1999); the second Flying to Montana is sixty by seventy-seven inches (also 1999).These radiate a quiet energy and should not be missed.
The work of Tadeusz Torzecki is a discovery. Tadeusz Torzecki's Untitled II is a spindle of steel and handmade paper (cast by Jocelyn Todd) (24"w.x24"d.x106"h.), and lit from within. Untitled II seems a lantern from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream or a sonnet: hard steel forms the basic corpus, but the webbing supports a delicate interlace of variegated paper, which "alters when it alteration finds" -- light changes as the play of internal and external rays combine in effect within the skin. Torzecki's Untitled I (8"x8"x57"), of steel and sandblasted glass, functions as a archetype of house, and further as a 'spirit box.' The artist's Untitled IV and Untitled V, related pieces, combine wood and steel in staffs. In this gathering of twenty artists, the work ranges from serious insight into the human condition, through applied and decorative, to the light and conceptually playful. There is a sampling of fine art to gratify each particular patron of the arts. "The Polish Connection" is an international exhibition; and it is indeed in Schaumburg, Illinois. The Chicago Athenaeum at Schaumburg has a website http://www.chi-athenaeum.org. Some of the artists' work may also be viewed at http://www.societyforarts.com
Finis Part I --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. |
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