27 December 2025

Exhibition "LIGHT. Practices of Resilience"

Artists: Zofia Artymowska, Mirosław Bałka, Zdzisław Beksiński, Urszula Broll, Tomasz Ciecierski, Anna Cyronek-Kalinowska, Andrzej Dłużniewski, Wojciech Fangor, Stefan Gierowski, Władysław Hasior, Anna Huskowska-Młynarska, Jerzy Kałucki, Koji Kamoji, Tadeusz Kantor, Paweł Kowalewski, Dorota Kozieradzka, Janina Kraupe-Świderska, Jadwiga Maziarska, Wiesław Michalak, Andrzej Pawłowski, Barbara Pniewska, Agnieszka Polska, Józef Robakowski, Jadwiga Sawicka, Antoni Starczewski, Henryk Stażewski, Władysław Strzemiński, Tomasz Tatarczyk, Jerzy Tchórzewski, Franciszka Themerson, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Ryszard Winiarski, Teresa Żarnower. Curator: Ania Muszyńska. Curatorial team: Magdalena Marczak-Cerońska, Kama Kieremkampt. EXHIBITION DESCRIPTION: The exhibition LIGHT. PRACTICES OF RESILIENCE is a story about how light — both physical and metaphorical — shapes our perception, emotions and inner strength. This fundamental arché, source of life and energy, of truth and knowledge, guides us through a show that invites reflection on where we look for inner strength and how we build our own resilience. The exhibition reminds us that people have always been able to adapt to changing conditions — seeking light even in darkness, finding meaning, creating new forms of life and art. Building resilience is a daily practice that lets us survive and carry on. The works on display explore the presence of light in painting as a tool for building composition, tone and character, but also as a symbol of hope, perseverance and transformation. The exhibition's theme was inspired by Jerzy Tchórzewski's painting Man and Light (1956), made not long after the Second World War, during the political "thaw." The painting thus takes on the dimension of a metaphor for rebirth, both artistic and existential — an exploding star within the work becomes a sign of hope and new creative energy. Tchórzewski is counted among the most compelling individual voices in Polish art of the second half of the 20th century; his painting radiates drama and expression — blazing fires, pulsing flames, sparking lightning and trembling, electric lines tear across the canvas, giving his images a spectacular character. Mieczysław Porębski wrote of the perception of the artist's painting: "The light Jerzy Tchórzewski created differs from every light our perception is used to, the kind sanctioned in the paintings we have encountered. It is an infracerebral light. It does not illuminate real objects and does not submit to the ordinary laws of colour harmony whose source is the sun. Glowing at the edges of forms that stubbornly lodge in the subconscious, running in phosphorescent bands across their surface, isolating and bounding them, it becomes an index of tension." A parallel thread in the exhibition is the varied practices of building resilience developed by artists in response to personal and historical experience. One is the enchanting of the world — subtle gestures found in the work of Janina Kraupe-Świderska and Urszula Broll, where imagination and spirituality become tools for overcoming the everyday. Resilience also shows itself through physical activity, in exercise and in testing the limits of the body and endurance, as with Dorota Kozieradzka. Other artists turn to meditation and the spiritual dimension, finding in them a space of stillness and strength, as with Koji Kamoji. Some wrestle with the very matter of art: Teresa Tyszkiewicz, exacting with herself, drove thousands of pins into the surface of a canvas, making of that gesture both an act of concentration and a test of endurance. Barbara Pniewska, working in the difficult and rarely chosen technique of metal relief, made compositions that were at once a metaphor of strength and a protective armour; her work, formed in the 1960s and 70s, including after her emigration to the United States, entered major collections and today, seen in this exhibition, stands as testimony to a singular artistic search. Pniewska could turn a material associated with harsh industrial production into organic, bodily, sensual forms — at once somewhat dark, as if drawn from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis." Metal in her work becomes both a surrealist metaphor and an expression of strength, resilience and creative courage. No exhibition on this theme could omit the classics of geometric abstraction — a current that reveals its essence in a particularly suggestive way precisely through light. Here, colour and form, subjected to the rigour of compression, generate extraordinary energy through the refraction, reflection and vibration of light. In this context, we hear the early, somewhat raw yet intensely coloured compositions of Wojciech Fangor: their simple, almost emblematic form glows with a vivid, pulsing colour, as if trying to capture the phenomenon of emanation. Alongside them is a painting by Jerzy Kałucki, held in an unerring geometric order, a severe and radical black that, through subtly designed proportions, turns into a kind of luminous architecture. A delicate, gently muted tension of light resounds in the intimate compositions of Anna Huskowska-Młynarska; her monochrome visions, seemingly ascetic, conceal inner arrangements of luminosity, as if light were matter that never quite surfaces but smoulders beneath the skin, beneath the surface of the canvas, forever negotiating its own presence. On the border of abstraction and conceptualism sit the works of Ryszard Winiarski, which use mirrors that, as he himself wrote, add an extra dimension to his compositions — reflecting not only light but the viewer too, turning the work into a space of play between rule and chance, between presence and disappearance. Without light there is no memory, Franciszka Themerson seems to say. From the white of her paintings, human silhouettes emerge gently, processions of figures flickering like the shadows of communities long gone — full of poignant silence and fragility, they have become testimony to a time that no longer exists yet still demands presence. Themerson left for England in the 1930s; during the Second World War her closest family perished at Treblinka. Her postwar works, passing through memories full of darkness, build a kind of brightness — a luminous testimony to what has passed, yet still radiates. The exhibition resounds strongly, too, with the banners of Władysław Hasior — manifesto-flags: "Banner Full of Radiance" and "Banner of Blue Hope." These are emblems of faith in the human condition, in inexhaustible imagination, in the possibility of transcending limits. Hasior, a distinctive voice of a generation marked by war, understood that whoever survived the conflagration had received a priceless gift. With courage and, at times, controversial sharpness, he juxtaposed objects, images and metaphors, creating compositions that still inspire today, as a manifesto of the drive toward absolute creative freedom. In another register, Agnieszka Polska weaves a spiritual, tender, almost sentimental story about our world in the film What the Sun Has Seen, its title borrowed from a poem by Maria Konopnicka. Sequences of earthly landscapes viewed from the sun's perspective let us gain distance from our everyday fears, anxieties and desires — a stoic attempt to describe reality, pointing to the overriding purpose of life: doing good, even if it happens in the shadow of chaos. Polska's film becomes a meditation on the condition of the contemporary world, in which light illuminates what truly matters. An exhibition on the theme of light could not do without two great masters for whom light became not merely a tool but the very ontological foundation of art. Light — the condition of seeing, and therefore of the existence of all the visual arts — is treated here not as metaphor but as a foundation, without which the eye remains blind and the image dead. This way of thinking finds its fullest expression in Władysław Strzemiński's "Theory of Vision," regarded as a fundamental treatise on the nature of perception. That is why we present compositions of his that sit at the intersection of two of the artist's key concepts: his rigorous, almost ascetic unism, and his series of afterimages, in which light is captured as a purely physiological experience — a record of a sensation, an echo of looking held in time and memory. For Strzemiński, light is not only a sensation but also a space, a kind of matrix in which the image is born. This idea was carried forward in the 1950s by Stefan Gierowski. Before he became one of the foremost seekers of colour and light in Polish abstract painting, he spent a long time trying to find his own language. It was ultimately his encounter with Strzemiński's thought that opened new territory for him — a cosmic space, understood not as landscape but as phenomenon, an emanation of energy, a tension between darkness and illumination. His early monochrome series from the late 1950s, restrained yet charged with inner dynamism, are regarded today as among the finest achievements of his career; even Zbigniew Herbert made no secret of his fascination with them, seeing in these paintings an almost metaphysical visualisation of infinity — an attempt to speak the cosmos in the language of light. Gierowski, analysing and contemplating Strzemiński's path, opened his own, in which light becomes matter, idea and the space that gives birth to the image — perhaps even a world that only becomes visible through the image itself. *** At the same time, this exhibition is a meeting of two institutions bound by years of collaboration and mutual respect. Our sincere thanks to Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź for its many loans, and for the years of partnership and shared thinking about the role of art in public space that came with them. We believe that developing dialogue between public and private institutions is an essential part of building a responsible cultural environment — both in substance and in institutional terms — while also helping to strengthen the presence of Polish art, and postwar Polish art in particular, in contemporary debates at home and abroad, and in the awareness of the audiences who take part in our shared work.