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 Rubers
Phot. Tytus Szabelski

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

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. Simone De Iacobis

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

This interactive show is an invitation for whole families to explore the alphabet of motor imagination though abstraction. By testing the boundaries between the solid and the fluid, the clear and the blurred, the tangible and the ephemeral, the participants get a chance to discover new levels of their creativity. The installation encourages them to play with movement, establish meanings, and share an experience as a family by engaging in contemporary dance. The performance is also an opportunity to negotiate the images and shapes created together by the performers and the participants, and to develop a dialogue between their different forms. Will they all fit on one stage at the end?