“Lifted Threads”, 2025, linen yarn, carpet hanger
The work was created for the exhibition “Willa siostra BWA. 60 lat galerii BWA w Zielonej Górze”, BWA Zielona Góra, 2025
Phot. Karolina Spiak / BWA Zielona Góra

Alicja Bielawska’s site-specific work has been created in the garden of the villa in Zielona Góra – the frames of the two carpet hangers, entwined with blue-tinged linen yarn, refer to the building’s recent function as a music school. They bring to mind staves or lines in a notebook, as well as the taut strings of instruments. The artist weaves a delicate, sometimes uneven thread, as if creating a space to continue recording history. The artist’s gesture and the use of yarn can also be related to the history of the workers of the dyeing and weaving factories in pre-war Gruenberg.

“Jesteś tam w tym”, 2025
tkanina (przędza lniana naturalna i barwiona ręcznie szyszkami olszy czarnej), haft, stal.
Wykonanie tkaniny: tkanie ręczne Beata Wietrzyńska / In Weave
Praca powstała na wystawę “1945. Nie koniec, nie początek”,
Muzeum Historii Żydów Polskich POLIN, 2025
Fot. Alicja Bielawska, Maciek Jaźwiecki / POLIN

I
tylko znikasz i znikasz
jesteś tam w tym
znikającym ruchu

(niczym słowo, być może)

II
jesteś w moim
znikającym ruchu

(wśród wszystkich moich zmarłych przyjaciół)

Jon Fosse, Pies i Anioł, 2024. wyd. Biuro Literackie

Stukot krosna – miarowy, niespieszny rytm dłoni i stóp przesuwa nitki przędzy między nićmi osnowy, tworząc wątek.
Tkanina jest misterną strukturą. Zaprojektowana przez Alicję Bielawską, tkana zgodnie z najstarszą tradycją, ręcznie przez mistrzynię tkacką, Beatę Wietrzyńską. Lnianą przędzę Alicja barwiła szyszkami olszy czarnej. To pracochłonny proces, w którym natura i przypadek współtworzą nieprzewidywalne niuanse koloru. W początkowych szarościach, po chwili uważnego spojrzenia, w zależności od światła, można dostrzec odcienie fioletów, brązów i umbry. To barwienie jest aktem zaufania żywiołom, poddaniem się naturze i jej zmiennym nastrojom. Olsza czarna, drzewo o leczniczych właściwościach, jest zdolne do regeneracji: przywraca życie wyjałowionej ziemi. Natura wnika tu w samą tkankę dzieła, przynosząc ze sobą swoją historię – pamięć o trwałości, o zdolności do odradzania się w obliczu zniszczenia. Praca powstała specjalnie na wystawę “Nie koniec, nie początek. 1945” w Muzeum Polin.
Faktura tkaniny jest opowieścią, którą możnaby czytać dotykiem. Przędza typu bouclé tworzy subtelne wypukłości – jakby zapis w alfabecie Braille’a, który czeka na odczytanie. Czy splot niesie słowa?
Na powierzchni pojawiają się hafty – delikatne rysunki, niemal niewidoczne, wymagające skupienia, by je dostrzec. Są jak ciche wezwania do uważności. Przywołują przedmioty pokazywane na wystawie. To pamiątki-artefakty, ślady minionego życia osób, których losy tworzą jej narrację.
Anni Albers w książce „On Weaving”, opublikowanej w 1965 roku, napisała: „Bycie twórczym to nie tyle pragnienie zrobienia czegoś, ile wsłuchiwanie się w to, co chce być zrobione: dyktat materiałów” („Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as the listening to that which wants to be done: the dictation of the materials”). Tkanina Alicji Bielawskiej niesie treści, które wypowiada się szeptem. Jest zapisem, w którym splatają się przeszłość i teraźniejszość, miarowy ruch dłoni, pamięć, obecność.
Alicja Bielawska od lat bada relację między materią, pamięcią a codziennością, tworząc rzeźby, instalacje, rysunki, które operują subtelnością formy i znaczeń. Jej praktyka artystyczna opiera się na czułym geście – śladzie dotyku, wrażliwości na materiały, które noszą w sobie historię. W pracy Jesteś tam w tym artystka kontynuuje swoje poszukiwania, eksplorując związek między przemijaniem a trwaniem, między ulotnością a zapisem, oddając głos materii, która pamięta.

Natalia Andrzejewska

Solo exhibition “Recurring Points in the Net of Rays”,
Przypkowski Museum in Jędrzejów, 2025
Phot. Bartosz Górka

The cyclical nature of the seasons and the sun’s movement across the sky led ancient communities to experience time as a rotating wheel. Every end became a beginning; past and future ceased to exist, and the present stretched into eternity.
Alicja Bielawska’s multi-element installation at the Przypkowski Museum in Jędrzejów explores this metaphysical and anthropological understanding of time and objects. The sculptures, textiles, ceramics, and drawings presented by the artist are, as she emphasizes, autonomous works of art, yet they remain interconnected. The shapes of these objects reference everyday items, scaled up or altered by memory. The recurring colors and forms across various techniques create a kind of axis mundi – a cosmic axis cutting through the everyday, a pause in time, once believed to be the point of contact between what has been and what is yet to come.
The points, diagonals, spirals, and arcs mapped out by Bielawska form a narrative on the edge of the empirical, the sensory, and the spiritual. They act as a visual code of geometric abstraction, softened by hand-drawn lines, the irregularity of ceramic vessels, and stains on fabric. They lead the viewer through a sensual experience of color and the tactile qualities of various materials. Ultimately, they frame the cosmic forces that link Bielawska’s objects into a story about themselves, about our relationships with things, and about the entanglement of time that flows between them.
As in any cosmography, Bielawska’s micro-universe has its stellar keystone – the Sun. The shimmering warm hues of the textiles and glazes on the artist’s creased ceramic vases become a material sign of a pagan epiphany of light. The alchemical power of rays is evoked in a ceramic gnomon mounted on the gallery wall and in colorful hemispheres arranged in circular trajectories. The life-giving force of the Sun is reflected in a fan of colors found in folding screens made of fabrics dyed with onion skins, tansy, elderberries, and spruce cones. In Bielawska’s cosmic universe, the cycle of life can be viewed through the lens of objects, nature, and ourselves. In the exhibition’s design, the human figure becomes a key point of reference, a metrical proportion for nearly everything around it. Yet, the humankind is not the measure of all things – only, and profoundly, a component of the whole. That is why, within the net of lines that integrates the exhibition, visitors will not find a trap, but rather a space for reflection – on time, memory, objects, and the light that exist both within us and around us.

Monika Przypkowska

The exhibition “Recurring Points in the Net of Rays” features the following works:
In the northern part of the Pavilion:
“Materials of Time I, II, III, IV”, 2025, glazed ceramics, tables from the collection of the Przypkowski Museum in Jędrzejów
“Accretions”, 2025, silk hand-dyed with plant-based dyes (shades obtained from onion skins), steel, paint
“Recurring Points”, 2024, crayon, pencil on paper

In the southern part of the Pavilion:
“Between the Ray and the Shadow (screen)”, 2025, silk hand-dyed with plant-based dyes (pink dye from spruce cones, yellow from tansy, blue from elderberries), steel, paint
“Double Spaces I, II”, 2025, crayon on paper
“Variable Configurations of Time”, 2025, glazed ceramics, brass

This project was completed as part of a scholarship programme funded by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.

“The World will Never End”, duo exhibition with Krzysztof Wróblewski,
Gdańsk City Gallery, Gdańsk, 2025
Phot. Alina Żemojdzin / Gdańsk City Gallery

„The world will never end” is the title of the exhibition, and it sounds like a good omen or a spell filled with optimism. This paraphrase, taken out of its original context, that is A Song on the End of the World by Czesław Miłosz, could easily be the climax line uttered by a heroine or a hero in a drama or a film script. This association does not seem too far fetched from where we stand. After all, the exhibition presenting artworks by Alicja Bielawska and Krzysztof Wróblewski should be considered a kind of conversation. A conversation that borders on a polemic, reflecting the superficially distant points from which the two artists view reality. Their dialogue takes a non-verbal form – visual statements, such as paintings, objects, installations, fabrics. And upon closer inspection, we can easily see the fellowship that arises somewhere in-between the works created according to different methods employed by the artists.
 
Alicja Bielawska focuses her interests on everyday occurrences. Yet her detailed observations often take simplified forms venturing far from their original sources. The artist uses a characteristic visual language whose strength lies in its sensitivity and its sensorial power to influence viewers. The existing space or architecture becomes as important to her as color and form. Bielawska seems to work mainly in relation to the space – she surrounds a pillar in the exhibition space with her textile installation, entitled At This Time of Day Even the Shadows Are in Color (2018), and in the middle of the space she places a set of works, entitled Sleeping Trajectories (2020), resembling a spatial drawing. The performative potential of it is emphasized by the very fact that the installation was initially the focal point of actions involving female performers. Bielawska once again animates her artwork by inviting Dana Chmielewska who prepared a premiere choreographic performance for the Günter Grass Gallery in Gdańsk.
 
More than in the process of visual perception itself, Alicja Bielawska is interested in externalizing the experiences confined within the boundaries of our body. Attempting to share them and search for alternative methods of perceiving reality has recently become a fundamental issue in her work. Georges Perec wrote about playing with space, for example, by pointing your little finger at the sky to get a solar eclipse, or taking a photo of yourself holding the Leaning Tower of Pisa[1]. Bielawska seems to play similar games with perception and space, treating it like a palimpsest, and overwriting it with brilliant arrangements of her works in various surroundings.
 
Krzysztof Wróblewski appears to do the opposite – to him, an image is the basic form of describing the world, and he considers the multitude of images a set of messages received from the environment. In the works presented at the exhibition, prepared with this presentation in mind, he transfers visual experience to reproducing reality by means of painting. However, he is not interested in a realistic visual narrative. Science is his starting point which he attempts to bend, like a fierce researcher, and move into the field of visual arts, developing the subject with his own compositional solutions. He translates his view of space into sequences of geometric figures – the patterns obtained in this way are constrained by mathematical structures and permutations, referring to those created by Roger Penrose. They take on modular relief forms built from a combination of ten- and twenty-sided shapes. The artist’s latest works are not only a continuation of his own practice, but a response to Alicja Bielawska’s proposals. He incorporates the fragmentary, limited condition of our perception into his works, bringing to mind the words of the above mentioned Perec: „Space is what arrests our gaze, what our sight stumbles over: the obstacle, the bricks, an angle, a vanishing point. Space is when it makes an angle, when it stops, when we have to turn for it to start off again. There’s nothing ectoplasmic about space; it has edges, it doesn’t go off in all directions, it does all that needs to be done for the railway lines to meet well short of infinity”[2].
 
In addition to Penrose tiling, Wróblewski employs Stanisław Ulam’s method of imaging prime numbers, while creating his paintings. He uses the spiral developed by the Polish mathematician to make fractal compositions, such as in the painting Spiral 2 (2019/2020) from the No Quick Response series. The title of the series suggests inquisitiveness contained in Wróblewski’s method, and the conviction that there are no simple answers. It should be noted that the artist’s creative process resembles a visual experiment – he reads images of everyday life as well as historical paintings by applying mathematical and physical principles. Following the words of Władysław Strzemiński, that an artist does not let visual experiences pass futilely – they carefully analyze what each of them means and what part of reality it corresponds to[3].
 
In the meantime, somewhere between the neurophysiological, mathematical reflection of  Wróblewski, and Bielawska’s sensorial, emotional retrospects and games, a common ground of their interests becomes clear. It is the experience of everyday life getting translated into metaphors, non-representational forms and simplified figures. What makes the artists’ dialogue dynamic is the assumption that the artworks remain in the constant state of becoming – being constituted by ways of looking and their correspondence with the gallery space. The focus on the surrounding reality as well as the artists’ affirmative attitude towards it suggest that the structure of the world may rise beyond the common understanding of time and space. The limits of our knowledge presented in this way make the phrase „there will be no end of the world” become more convincing, for a moment at least.
 
Franciszek Smoręda
 
[1] Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin, London 1998, p. 85
[2] Ibidem, p. 81
[3] Władysław Strzemiński, Teoria widzenia (Theory of Vision), Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1958, p. 13

“I Intertwine Your Fingers With Mine”,
duo exhibition with Małgorzata Widomska,
Galeria Śmierć Człowieka, Warsaw, 2024
Phot. Bartosz Górka

The title of Alicja Bielawska and Małgorzata Widomska’s exhibition, I Intertwine Your Fingers with Mine, subtle and surreal, taken from one of Widomska’s poems, signals the encounter between the two artists is going to be a special one. But despite the initial defamiliarization, twining is an ordinary, even intimate activity. Women weave, knit and braid in domestic or work spaces. Textiles have been produced thanks to their hands, away from people’s eyes and somewhat on the outskirts of more eminent events. Neither home nor workshop are quite representative spaces. The dynamics between the domestic and lavish, concealed and exposed gives entwinement another context. In both home and workshop, what is ready entangles with what is only becoming. The desired tangles with the feasible.

In Bielawska and Widomska’s exhibition, entwinement is seen in positive terms, as a connection rather than a threatening entanglement. In Death of a Man, a small home-like Warsaw gallery significantly equipped with a big wooden closet (a typical piece of home furniture), the two artists present works that dialogue with each other in a friendly proximity. Although their works differ in terms of techniques–Widomska’s primary medium is the oil painting, whereas Bielawska decided to show her textiles and ceramics–displayed together, these works add several other contexts and hint at diverse types of connections we may make when we open up to a lived experience.

Both artists are particularly attuned to details. It seems counterintuitive at first. Małgorzata Widomska’s two abstract oil paintings, The Great Mirror and The Door to My Father’s, are quite big in size. One canvas is 200 cm and the other 220 cm tall, which may indicate the artist will be interested in synthesizing or summarizing her experience more than in recreating the particulars of it. Yet what these canvases actually depict are small, inconspicuous pieces of Widomska’s family home furnishings. The artist contemplates an uneven gouge in the door to her father’s study, or the corroding edges of a hall mirror. Such an attentive consideration, or gaze, seems related to the painter’s creative strategy. As she writes in her statement, for her, the canvas enables the artist to work on the source experience, give or uncover the meaning of it. Looking at her paintings, we get right into someone’s contemplative mind, where life is being studied and apprehended in its many manifestations. It is a world where everything has its own texture, smell and history, as well as its own future incarnation, for example, in someone’s memory.

Alicja Bielawska is attuned to the details of ordinary objects in a similar way. It may sound, again, a bit confounding as we would rather expect her to be focused on the composition, i.e. elaborate abstraction. And undoubtedly, Bielawska’s works are based on her deep understanding of composition. But as we read her poems accompanying the exhibition–the artist herself sees them as registers of her sensual encounters with textiles and ceramics–we realize Screens and Vessels may carry other meanings as well. Hand-dyeing and drying textiles, draping them on metal racks, admiring their softness or roughness, or–following the clay deformation and studying traditional ceramics firing and glazing techniques, the artist does not only recount her creative process, but also seamlessly redirects the viewers’ attention to what surrounds us. To what is most material and mundane, and very close to our bodies.

In Bielawska’s art, the realm of everyday life is in constant move. It is moving in both meanings of the word, moving us as well. It is a world in which a doorknob protrudes from a shape, colors can stroke human hands, wool has its own taste, and geometric figures, which in Euclidean geometry stubbornly remain two-dimensional, can materialize in the ordinary objects such as a table or bed. All these shapes, colors, smells and tastes also move through time by means of desire or memory.

I Intertwine Your Fingers with Mine is also very much an exhibition of what is not exhibited. Both on the level of the narrative–after all, we must recount how the father’s study might have been, what it might have meant for him, and what it might have been for a small child ourselves, based on Widomska’s fragmented recollections as an adult artist–and on the level of certain residuality, lingering and fleetingness inherent in a sensory experience, researched and present in Bielawska’s art.

Another connotation of intertwining, which only exists in Bielawska and Widomska’s native tongue, is obscure talk. In Polish, gibberish and plaiting are homonymous. Speaking incoherently, giving incomplete information and fantasizing, especially when we fill the gaps in what we know with imaginary stories, is called the same as interweaving. Historically, women’s voices were often silenced with this derogatory term. The feminist revisions of art techniques and somewhat arachnological reclaiming of applied arts–textiles, ceramics and crafts in their broadest sense–in this exhibition, therefore, include not only its formal level, but also the level of deepest narrative.

Natalia Malek

The Riverview Arts Festival, Warsztaty Kultury, Lublin, 2024
Phot. Marcin Butryn

“At this Time of the Day Even Shadows Have Colours (Pavilion)” is an art installation referring to the architecture of garden pavilions. It is set in a meadow next to the Bystrzyca River in Lublin. Light, semi-transparent fabrics suspended on a metal structure, move in the wind, the sun shines through them, mixing their colors. You can sit or lie down on the grass and watch them move. It is a work that draws attention to a given moment, to a moment that lasts. Observing, looking at reality requires stopping, slowing down the rhythm. This pavilion of colorful shadows attracts attention, from this place we can look at the surroundings in a different way. You can see how the sun is reflected in the water, how the duck’s feathers sparkle, how the dragonfly sways on the grass.

Foksal Gallery, Warsaw, 2024
Curator Maria Rubersz
Phot. Tytus Szabelski-Różniak

The body uses the senses to delve into the spaces and phenomena that surround it. It has its memory, allowing it to operate independent of the mind and discourse. It reacts to its surroundings, e.g. to a wall drawing, which holds performative potential. A drawing can take the hand’s kinesis and pass it on. The sight that looks without being set and focused on any one object, sight looking through silk, at semi-transparent fabrics with colors derived from natural dyes, sees differently. In his essay “The Eyes of the Skin,” whose title Alicja Bielawska has borrowed for her Foksal Gallery exhibition, Juhani Pallasmaa wrote: “Focused vision confronts us with the world, whereas peripheral vision envelops us in ‘the flesh of the world’.”*

Bringing her works into the space of the gallery, the artist alters the perfect white cube, known from thousands of photographs documenting hundreds of exhibitions since 1966 at Foksal Gallery, to encourage pleasure and comfort in the body. The central object of the exhibition is a soft, household seat, upholstered with jacquard fabric stitched according the artist’s design. The seat is the furthest thing from the minimalist, angular stools associated with Foksal Gallery, which once served as pedestals for displaying archival materials, still serving in the gallery as guardians of the past.

Working with the space, Alicja Bielawska also works with memory. The first thirty years of the gallery’s operations were decidedly androcentric. It was almost exclusively men who exhibited here, and most of the few women artists who appeared were tied to men who were important to the Foksal Gallery scene. An anecdote confirmed in the archive says that Annette Messager only exhibited at Foksal Gallery in 1978 because her partner, Christian Boltanski, made the presentation of his partner’s work a condition for his exhibition. Though few women have exhibited at Foksal Gallery, they have played a fundamental role. It suffices to look at the photographs of the openings or the gallery’s everyday workings. Although women worked with the artists organizing the exhibitions, their names do not appear in the archive, nor in traces or anecdotes. Women’s work for the gallery might be called a “labour of love,” as Wiktoria Szczupacka analyzes in her essay, “Foksal Gallery, Women and Labour of Love in the 1960s and 1970s.”**

Alicja Bielawska’s view of history is a peripheral view. The artist saw people, motifs, stories, traces, and invisible work, without which the gallery could not have operated. Artists, curators, and viewers, male and female, have spent time here, talked, created, forged and maintained contacts, experienced and created places. The focused gaze does not perceive this, for the focused gaze it is merely a vague and uninteresting backdrop. Warping the sharp edges and blurring the white cube, the artist has created a place to be together, to feel pleasure and safety.

Maria Rubersz

* Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2024), 6.
** Wiktoria Szczupacka, “Foksal Gallery, Women and Labour of Love in the 1960s and 1970s” in Revisiting Heritage, ed. Marika Kuźmicz (Warsaw: Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, 2019), 92–99 https://issuu.com/…/arton_book_revisiting_heritage_-_pd

Galeria Sztuki im. Jana Tarasina, Kalisz, 2024
Curator Paulina Olszewska
Phot. Bartosz Górka

In motion and in stillness

In spring, the Narew floodplains sparkle in the sun. The river, visible from the windows of Teresa Starzec and Alicja Bielawska’s house in Podlasie, seems to expand to the horizon. The vast landscape is not static even for a moment: its light changes with the time of day, and its shapes and colors change with the seasons.
Joint exhibition of women artists at Jan Tarasin Art Gallery in Kalisz transfers the dynamics of the Narew landscape to the exhibition space. Already in the vestibule of the exhibition we will come across golden, metallic ribbons – a fragment of Alicja Bielawska’s installation, which introduces almost dance-like movement into the gallery. The objects – screens – placed by the artist in the main hall co-create the choreography of the exhibition – their semicircular structures create circles in space. Fabrics flowing freely over them react to subtle air movements caused by the movement of viewers. The light entering through the windows is filtered by translucent, layered materials, which means that the perception of the installation changes during the day.
Teresa Starzec’s drawings and paintings are also full of movement. Their vibrant, energetic colors flow into each other, creating colorful bridges between compositions. The forms of the paintings arise from drawings in sketchbooks. The artist makes them not from nature, but, as she says, from memory. She draws them in the studio, sweepingly, using the energy of her whole body and pressing the accumulated emotions and impressions from observing selected motifs into the paper. She creates drawings in series, in one or several days, until they fill the entire sketchbook and become almost abstract – the final ones, the least representative, seem to touch the essence of reality. Some of them later become the seeds of paintings whose composition grows organically – in those presented in Kalisz, the flower petals smoothly turned into a landscape, and the color spots gained a cosmic element.
In the exhibition space filled with movement, the artists encourage us to stop and practice attentiveness. Seats designed by Alicja Bielawska allow viewers to change their body positions. Upholstered in soft jacquard fabrics, the patterns of which were also inspired by the Narew floodplains, they allow one to immerse oneself in the moment and actively, carefully observe one’s surroundings. They make it easier to focus and notice details. To identify differences in the intensity of colors and light in Teresa Starzec’s paintings, which result from observing the same motifs in the changing light of the day and seasons. To appreciate the colors of fabrics hand-dyed by Alicja Bielawska using madder, onion peels, and spruce cones, which introduce color directly distilled from nature into the gallery space. A slower observation will also allow one to notice the light scattered in the gallery. This, penetrating through the abstract holes of Cutouts by Bielawska – a screen inspired by the paper works of her grandmother, Halina Bielawska – at certain times of the day creates a mosaic of sunbeams in the gallery space, similar to the sparkling glints from the Narew pools.
Attentiveness is studying, discovering, experiencing the world in a multi-sensory manner, collecting and cultivating impressions, and memory work. It is easy to forget about it in the everyday rush. By introducing dynamics into the gallery space inspired by the experience of the natural landscape, the artists encourage us to immerse ourselves in the variability of nature and show that both in motion and in stillness we can be its active, conscious observers.

Aleksandra Kędziorek

Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2022
Phot. Simone De Iacobis

The exhibition ‘The Clothed Home: Tuning In To The Seasonal Imagination’ explores the ways in which textiles are used to reflect the rhythm of seasonal changes in domestic interiors. It recalls bygone rituals through an art installation, seeking inspiration for contemporary climate-responsive design. Living between centrally heated apartments and air-conditioned offices, we have become indifferent to the nuances of nature’s changing cycles. Contemporary design can help us tune into the seasons again. Conceptually rooted in Polish textile designs from the pre electricity era, the installation recalls domestic rituals that allow us to cultivate our relationship with the natural world and react more attentively to its continued changes.
In manor houses, aristocratic mansions and peasant cottages of pre-modern Poland, textiles were widely used as seasonal clothing for architecture. They helped adapt domestic spaces to the twelve phenological seasons characteristic of the Central European climate zone. Their recurring appearance in domestic interiors allowed for conscious participation in the cycles of nature – in celebrating the passage of time, with an enhanced sense of immersion in the circadian rhythm, and the sequence of light and darkness. As a result, ‘The Clothed Home’ functions as a resonator, helping residents feel the pulse of the natural world. By clothing a room of Somerset House, the installation sets out to offer visitors a similar, multi-sensory experience.

All textiles were designed by Alicja Bielawska and woven by: Folk Art Wijata, In Weave (Beata Wietrzyńska), “Koronka–Bobowa”: Spółdzielnia Pracy Rzemiosła Ludowego i Artystycznego (Agata Król, Danuta Myśliwiec, embroidery: Jadwiga Śliwa) and prof. Zenovia Shulha. Tailoring: Klaudia Filipiak (LAZY STUDIO).

The exhibition „Expanding the space of everyday life” by Alicja Bielawska presents new works of the artist made of fabric, ceramics and steel, with the main theme of community of memory. Bielawska consistently transforms her everyday observations into objects that create the stories shown at the exhibition. While visiting”Expanding the space of everyday life” we are placed in a first-person narrative where each viewer determines their own individual route and is invited to exercise attentiveness. Perception focuses on details, different textures and subtle color refractions. Through which the artist tells universal stories of objects and determines internal relations in space. Bielawska invites the viewer to be in motion in relation to the sculptures. The exhibition is designed so that one could slowly and carefully move between the objects, observe them from all sides and always take one’s own body as a starting point.
The handmade ceramics and textiles allude to a craftsman’s everyday life in which caring for oneself, others and the environment recurs as an important element. The slow rhythm and ritualistic nature of creating objects is evident in the works on display. They are characterized by a cycle that can be represented in four steps: looking, remembering, deconstructing and constructing anew.

Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 2022, Łódź
Curator Katarzyna Słoboda

 

Alicja Bielawska suggests we should treat works of art as models on which or thanks to which we can exercise our ability to sense the world around us. Artworks then may become guidelines leading us through reality, uncovering its hidden layers and aspects. The exhibition “At the Intersection of Lines” is the sixth in the “Prototypes” series, in which the artists tend to give new meanings and contexts to the works in the collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.

There are lines that lead us through the exhibition. The lines of steps, lines on paper, lines of encountered glances, lines outlining space, and finally—the lines covering the drawings, which number nearly fifty in this edition of “Prototypes.” However, drawing is not only an auxiliary medium here or a sketch for further work. It is also a full-fledged work of art, set in dialogue with the sculptures of Keith Sonnier, Thei Djordjadze, Katarzyna Kobro, and Alicja Bielawska herself. Abstraction is the dominant form in the works presented. However, the abstraction here is poetic and open to a multitude of interpretations. Its language is universal, it gives every viewer the opportunity to interpret the work intuitively and filter it through their own experiences. It engages with the memory of the recipient and their personal connotations, allowing the construction of new networks of associations around the recognized shapes, textures, and colours. The objects and materials from which the sculptures were made were taken from the real world that surrounds us and act as links between the abstract work and the recipient. Bielawska’s exhibition is a space separate from everyday life, but at the same time related to it. It is a microcosm where we can experience the ideas, thoughts, and feelings of the artists in conditions conducive to contemplation.

Alicja Bielawska has established an artistic dialogue with artists who have been active over the last hundred years, showing the flow of concepts and themes that keep coming back in the works of artists regardless of what period of time they represented, what place and what conditions they created in. The concept of openness in these works means that the authors of the exhibition are not only the artists whose works we can see here. The exhibition invites the viewer to cocreate it with their presence. Our own bodies that move between these works of art are not only the receptors of the art, but they also interact with the art. Each visitor brings their own rhythm. The choreographic theme is strongly marked by Johanna Billing’s film “I’m Lost without Your Rhythm.” In this screening — as in the whole exhibition space — simple, everyday movements create dialogues both between people and with their surroundings. The spatiality of the sculptures creates a situation in which our gaze does not stop at the sculptures themselves, but penetrates them and reaches beyond them. The shapes are not defined forever; each step we make generates a new view and thus a new creation. There is not one preferred and final image — Bielawska offers us a multitude of equally important perspectives.

Artists: Alicja Bielawska, Johanna Billing, Thea Djordjadze, Emilia Małgorzata Dłużniewska, Simone Forti, Maria Jarema, Koji Kamoji, Katarzyna Kobro, Keith Sonnier, Kajetan Sosnowski, Henryk Stażewski, Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Themerson, Teresa Tyszkiewicz

 

Phot. Anna Zagrodzka

STUDIO Gallery, 2022, Warsaw
Curator Paulina Olszewska

 

‘MATERIA(L)NIE / (IM)MATERIAL’ is a conversation between two artists about sensuality and materiality. (…)
In her spatial installation Bielawska creates a tension between what is visible and touchable and what is inaccessible to the senses and exists only as conjecture. Especially for Galeria Studio she has created new works or reached for ones that have not been shown before; these are both autonomous and also create the conditions for the reception of Barbara Falender’s works. In the lower gallery space the installation invites viewers to enter and look for the ‘Erotic Pillows’, creating an intimate situation of contact with the sculptures and savouring the pleasure of communing with them. (…) ‘The Invitation’ installation (2021) is an undulating form with backstreets and hollows where Falender’s sculptures have been placed. The use of semi-transparent material makes the ‘Erotic Pillows’ both clearly visible and separate from each other. Gradient shades of pink, orange and yellow contrast with the white of the Carrara marble. In the upper gallery space, Alicja Bielawska’s installation has been juxtaposed with drawings on paper by Barbara Falender. The dialogue takes place in the language of materials—metal, fabric and ceramics. One can see similarities and feel tensions between the works. In Bielawska’s work the abstract becomes corporeal, in Falender’s, the corporeal becomes abstract.

Paulina Olszewska

Phot. Michał Matejko

The exhibition ‘The Clothed Home: Tuning In To The Seasonal Imagination’ explores the ways in which textiles are used to reflect the rhythm of seasonal changes in domestic interiors. It recalls bygone rituals through an art installation, seeking inspiration for contemporary climate-responsive design. Living between centrally heated apartments and air-conditioned offices, we have become indifferent to the nuances of nature’s changing cycles. Contemporary design can help us tune into the seasons again. Conceptually rooted in Polish textile designs from the pre electricity era, the installation recalls domestic rituals that allow us to cultivate our relationship with the natural world and react more attentively to its continued changes.
In manor houses, aristocratic mansions and peasant cottages of pre-modern Poland, textiles were widely used as seasonal clothing for architecture. They helped adapt domestic spaces to the twelve phenological seasons characteristic of the Central European climate zone. Their recurring appearance in domestic interiors allowed for conscious participation in the cycles of nature – in celebrating the passage of time, with an enhanced sense of immersion in the circadian rhythm, and the sequence of light and darkness. As a result, ‘The Clothed Home’ functions as a resonator, helping residents feel the pulse of the natural world. By clothing a room of Somerset House, the installation sets out to offer visitors a similar, multi-sensory experience.

All textiles were designed by Alicja Bielawska and woven by: Folk Art Wijata, In Weave (Beata Wietrzyńska), “Koronka–Bobowa”: Spółdzielnia Pracy Rzemiosła Ludowego i Artystycznego (Agata Król, Danuta Myśliwiec, embroidery: Jadwiga Śliwa) and prof. Zenovia Shulha. Tailoring: Klaudia Filipiak (LAZY STUDIO).

Organized by The Adam Mickiewicz Institute

Phot. London Design Biennale 2021, Marcin Urban/IAM, 2021

‘The Clothed Home: Tuning In To The Seasonal Imagination’ explores the ways in which textiles are used to reflect the rhythm of seasonal changes in domestic interiors. It recalls bygone rituals through an art installation, seeking inspiration for contemporary climate-responsive design. Living between centrally heated apartments and air-conditioned offices, we have become indifferent to the nuances of nature’s changing cycles. Contemporary design can help us tune into the seasons again. Conceptually rooted in Polish textile designs from the pre electricity era, the installation recalls domestic rituals that allow us to cultivate our relationship with the natural world and react more attentively to its continued changes.
In manor houses, aristocratic mansions and peasant cottages of pre-modern Poland, textiles were widely used as seasonal clothing for architecture. They helped adapt domestic spaces to the twelve phenological seasons characteristic of the Central European climate zone. Their recurring appearance in domestic interiors allowed for conscious participation in the cycles of nature – in celebrating the passage of time, with an enhanced sense of immersion in the circadian rhythm, and the sequence of light and darkness. As a result, ‘The Clothed Home’ functions as a resonator, helping residents feel the pulse of the natural world. By clothing a room of Somerset House, the installation sets out to offer visitors a similar, multi-sensory experience.

All textiles were designed by Alicja Bielawska and woven by: Folk Art Wijata, In Weave (Beata Wietrzyńska), “Koronka–Bobowa”: Spółdzielnia Pracy Rzemiosła Ludowego i Artystycznego (Agata Król, Danuta Myśliwiec, embroidery: Jadwiga Śliwa) and prof. Zenovia Shulha. Tailoring: Klaudia Filipiak (LAZY STUDIO).

Organized by The Adam Mickiewicz Institute

The Municipal Gallery bwa in Bydgoszcz, 2021

Alicja Bielawska’s exhibition leads the viewer to a space where the soft lines of the sculptures mingle with the lines in the drawings, and the planes of the fabrics delineate spatial relationships. The themes taken up by the artist touch on issues of perception and attentiveness. The artist uses different types of fabrics in her works: single-colour, shiny, transparent, fleecy and with original patterns. She uses them to create shapes inspired by everyday life filtered through the senses.
The sculptures interact with each other, creating constellations of objects, and the viewer becomes a co-creator in this situation, moving between the works. At the exhibition, selected works from the last few years will appear in new configurations that can serve as a pretext for viewers to reflect on the experience of everyday life.

Phot. Bartosz Górka

Again and again, Alicja Bielawska’s sculptures go wavy and straighten out. On the one hand, they outline the shape of the ceased activities, having accumulated all their earlier movement, with loops, slaloms, ripples and bends. On the other, they accommodate the potential for further manoeuvres.
The artist likes to think of her pieces as a kind of an alphabet — a set of forms availed for use in personal choreographies, waiting to become rearranged and endowed with new meanings. In this context, space becomes an archive of lines that have been delineated by viewers in motion. And although science demands that our organs of sight should be tools of objective analysis, that is calculating, rational and critical, eyes reunite with the body, so that, in unison with the sculptures, they could create short-lasting yet impassioned connections.
The objects reflect trajectories of viewers who walk around, slowing down their steps or perhaps retreating altogether, with inclined, skewed or raised heads. Various stands, axes, partitions, hoops, pennants, rails and ropes initiate dynamics that forms a treaty on gravity, wherein the weight of the cloths — as they hang down and turn inside out — is a way to express the fascination with the downward force that drives matter to earth, to another physical substance. Due to the ever-changing relationships between objects, which are moved by airflows induced by the viewers’ bodies, the exhibition has no permanent spots — it seems to be swaying and spilling all around.

(Phot. Marek Gardulski)

Nowe Miejsce, Warszawa, 2020

The exhibition Figures Full of Light is arranged into open and closed forms, into colours, lines, and shapes that outline and describe. The
‘figures’ of the title outline that which seems intangible: impressions, sensations, memories, and awe. These ‘figures’ are records of images emerging from beneath the eyelids and fingertips. The visual language imprinted on the canvas, on a sheet of paper, or in clay, allows the indescribable to be captured. However, in order to represent something this ephemeral, one needs to keep returning to it, repeating the shapes, and searching for that which seems to be already documented—but changes shape once again—and transforms before our eyes. Perhaps this is what prompts the continual attempts to organise these ‘figures’ into different variations. It is only in their sum that they can give us a sense of the richness of the world. There isn’t just one perfect record, but an infinite number. Nonetheless, a choice needs to be made about how this record will be presented.

The joint exhibition of Teresa Starzec and Alicja Bielawska (privately, mother and daughter) is arranged into repeating motifs, whose exploration derives from an urge to describe the experience of the world. Each of the two artists works with her own techniques and a different visual vocabulary. However, what their works share is a remarkably sensual and sensitive way of using colours and constructing shapes—tools employed by both artists to direct our attention towards perceiving the world.

In the works of Starzec, recurring motifs reconstruct the outcomes of
a continued observation of landscape. In her recent series of large format oil paintings dating from 2019/2020, displayed in the exhibition,
the observation of nature turns into meditation. Mandorla shapes drawn from the landscape and from flora are superimposed, multiplied, and stretched out, leading the paintings to vibrate through their repeat arrangements. They become dynamic documentation of the energy fields permeating the world. On a visual level, these vibrations also derive from the changing colours, which introduce air, light, and depth into the pictures. These nearly three metre tall paintings were created in the artist’s studio by the Narew river, in the direct vicinity of nature, with a view of the meandering river’s valley on one side and sunsets peeking through tree trunks on another, and on yet another, a wild meadow covered in flowers: mulleins, blueweeds, evening primroses, yarrows, and St John’s wort. This proximity to nature has left its mark on the paintings, which convey a vibrating substantiality through the decisions drawn in broad lines, sharp like leaves of grass. Meanwhile, the layers of intertwining colours evoke air as well as a double image of the water’s depth and its reflection. Nature is celebrated through the multiplication of motifs and intensification of colours, all taken together.

A celebration of reality is also at the core of the works of Bielawska, whose sculptures and drawings form subtle relationships between objects, viewers, and space. The artist draws her inspiration from the everyday sphere, which she references through the use of textiles and ceramic shapes, set on steel or aluminium structures. In the new series of works, the artist’s attention oscillates around the form of a vessel. The ceramic vessels: tall, short, shallow, and deep, with uneven sides, are an attempt at capturing the essence of the object, which has remained unchanged in its simplicity for millennia. In her drawings and pottery pieces, the artist searches for lines that can encompass a small section of space. The lines wave, stretch, bend, and overlap. Colour is an inseparable element of her works, whether it contributes the solidity of primary colours or a richness of shades, with alluring nuance. In her drawings, colour either appears as a decisive line describing a shape, or, replicated through multiple strokes, becomes vibrating matter which tries to grasp onto a shape. In the ceramic objects, colour not only coats the outside surface, but also becomes the mass of the material. The artist doesn’t reproduce any specific objects; her search for the shapes of vessels is more of a process of discovering their remembered outlines. Some stages of creation also lead to moments when the vessels are split up into pieces. Fragmentation is etched into her process of searching for shapes.

Alicja Bielawska