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