Lecture: Dorota Grubba-Thiede

Wanda Czełkowska: ‘For Me, Space Is a Person’

The work of great sculptress Wanda Czełkowska proceeded simultaneously, though independently. In the 1950s she began creating crackling, blooming sculptures, mainly separated heads, and through this she explored the phenomenon of joyfulness – this ‘authentic value that springs up from clear and kind fountain’. Her seductive Autoportret (Self-Portrait) from 1959 (a female bust, with naked breasts, revealing her interest in Etruscan art and attracting haptic perception) is one example. Wanda Czełkowska was happy when she received photographs from the exhibition in Paris, some of them ‘capturing’ people touching the sculpture’s breasts. The atmosphere of affirmative sensuality around Self-Portrait, created by the artist’s intentional exposure of the sculpture to viewers’ interaction, seems to anticipate VALIE EXPORT’s Tapp- und Tastkino (Tap and Touch Cinema) from 1968.

She also made innovative projects of an anti-gravity room in 1959/60 (anticipating conceptual art), whimsically corresponding with the ‘levitating’ self-portrait of Alina Szapocznikow: the polyester figure Podróż (Journey) from 1967, and her numerous sketched interpretations of the piece. The atmosphere of this piece’s ‘medium’ seems to relate to the musical imagination of Diamanda Galas, a performer who used elements of glossolalia in her work. The fact that Alina Szapocznikow and Wanda Czełkowska maintained friendly relations remains inspiring.

In 1972, Wanda Czełkowska created the conceptual, somewhat invisible installation Absolute Elimination of Sculpture as a Notion of Shape. She exhibited it on a 1:20 scale in 1973 (BWA Sopot and Kraków), and on a 1:1 scale at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko in 1995 in the space of the exhibition Around Sculpture of the 1970s and 1980s. The installation is also part of the exhibition Wanda Czełkowska: Art Is Not Rest at Muzeum Susch, curated by Matylda Taszycka. As Wanda Czełkowska emphasised, ‘For me, space is a person.’