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 Jadwiga Maziarska:   

Assembly

Curated by 

Rhea Anastas & Barbara Piwowarska

Opening: 15 June 2025

Assembly is the first extensive survey of Polish artist Jadwiga Maziarska (1913 – 2003) presented outside her native country. For the exhibition, Muzeum Susch has gathered the most significant works from her diverse body of art. 

The show's title, Assembly, reflects Maziarska's approach as both an "engineer and bricoleur" of source materials and methods, producing an abstraction that defies categorization within the postwar Polish art scene.

Maziarska studied (1934 – 1939) and lived in Kraków. She was a member of the artistic collective Grupa Krakowska, founded by Tadeusz Kantor. However, she was known as an outsider, focusing on her daring and progressive experimentation with various media.

The artist began enriching the texture of her paintings as early as 1946. A year later, she created her first textile work, incorporating irregular scraps of multicolored fabric with various weaves. Her paintings —essentially unique and fragile objects — were often made with ephemeral materials such as wax, sand, or groats. Her art was informed by science, phenomenology, mass photography, printed reproductions, and newspaper clippings, from which she developed autonomous structures.

Maziarska’s explorations in the field of matter painting were pioneering, preceding similar efforts not only by other Polish artists but also by Western European artists. Only years later did art historians recognize the chronological convergence of her work with movements such as art brut and matter painting.

During Maziarska’s lifetime, most art critics overlooked the crucial role of photographic mediation in her work, as well as the significance of her unique collection: Maziarska’s Atlas, which is well known today. The Atlas consists of photo sketches and cuttings from newspapers, illustrated magazines, and academic handbooks, compiled by the artist over the years. It served both as a means of understanding life and as a learning tool. She used it to incorporate the outside world into her reality, assigning new meanings to familiar images.

This approach makes Maziarska an artist whose work strongly resonates with contemporary times. Her artistic process, rooted in the physicality of assembling, responds to concepts of reproduction and modernity.

Jadwiga Maziarska was born in 1913 in Sosnowiec, Poland. In 1932 she enrolled in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius and also attended seminars on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Between 1934–1939 she studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (with Erna Rosenstein and Tadeusz Kantor). During this period, she was closely associated with the 1st Krakow Group and the Cricot Theatre. In 1937, together with Rosenstein, she took part in the performance of the Ephemeral Puppet Theatre—The Death of Tintagiles by Maeterlinck, directed by Kantor.

At the beginning of WWII, she actively helped the underground movement, acting as a liaison with the Kraków Ghetto. She also joined the Polish Workers' Party, started a job in the conservation studio of Stanisław Pochwalski (her future husband), and helped secure and hide historical artworks. In 1946 she took part in the Young Artists' Exhibition in Kraków, co-founding the Young Artists' Group (the so-called “Moderns”). From 1947 she created abstract paintings and appliqués. In 1948 she participated in the historically significant 1st Exhibition of Modern Art at the Palace of Arts in Kraków (alongside Kantor, Rosenstein, Wróblewski, among others).

In 1949 she collaborated with the Office of Production and Supervision of Aesthetics at the Ministry of Light Industry in Warsaw, designing patterns for printed fabrics. Between 1954–1956 she worked as a stage designer at the Puppet Theatrein Opole. In 1955 she took part in one of the first “Thaw” presentations of modern art—Exhibition of 9 Painters in Kraków—at that time introducing wax into her paintings. In 1957 she became a member of the Zaglebie Group and a founding member of the 2nd Krakow Group (Grupa Krakowska), exhibiting with both groups from then on. In the same year, her first solo exhibition took place at the House of Visual Artists in Kraków, and she also won a scholarship to travel to Paris, where she started collaborating with Galerie Stadler (which represented Antoni Tàpies, Karel Appel, Claire Falkenstein, Paul Jenkins) and Galerie Louise Leiris (founded by D.H. Kahnweiler).

She took part in many exhibitions in Poland and abroad, including Exhibitions of Modern Art at the Zacheta Gallery(1957, 1959) and Espaces Abstraits, curated by Michel Tapié at the Galleria d’Arte Cortina in Milan (1969), which also featured Lucio Fontana, Jackson Pollock, and Wols. Apart from painting, she created collages, reliefs, appliqués, spatial forms, and sculptures.

In 1991 her first monographic exhibition was held at the Palace of Arts in Kraków, and in 2001 she received the Jan Cybis Award. She died in 2003 at the age of 90. Recent exhibitions include the retrospective Atlas of the Imaginary at CCA Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2009) and a solo show Jadwiga Maziarska: 1913–2003 at Galerie Johnen (now Esther Schipper) in Berlin (2013).

Rhea Anastas is an independent curator, a cofounder of Orchard, a collectively run art space in New York (2005–2008), and a professor of art at the University of California, Irvine. Anastas received her BA (1990) and MA (1995) in art history from Columbia University; she received her PhD (2004) in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Within Orchard and across her collaborations and work as a writer and curator, Anastas has innovated with research, exhibition-making, and publishing as artistic forms.

Anastas is curator of numerous exhibitions including New Cuts (K8 Hardy); Christine Kozlov (co-curated with Nora Schultz); Louise Lawler: Edits and Projections (a collaboration with Lawler and Robert Snowden); Josephine Pryde: The Flight That Moved Them (co-curated with Robert Snowden); The Deep West Assembly (Cauleen Smith, co-curated with Mia Locks).

Anastas is editor and contributor to numerous publications including THE CLIP-ON METHOD (with Cady Noland); Louise Lawler: Receptions; Josephine Pryde: The Enjoyment of Photography; Witness to Her Art: Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell; and Eau de Cologne (co-edited with Michael Brenson).

Currently, Anastas is working on an exhibition of artwork by one of the earliest voices of Conceptual Art, Christine Kozlov, and her peers at Raven Row, London.

Barbara Piwowarska is a curator and art historian specializing in the legacy of avant-gardes. She was a recipient of the Kosciuszko Foundation scholarship at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University in Cambridge. She curated numerous monographic exhibitions, such as Jadwiga Maziarska: Atlas of the Imaginary at CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Erna Rosenstein: I Can Repeat Only Unconsciously at the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw; Erna Rosenstein: Organism at the Art Stations Foundation, Poznań; Aura Rosenberg: Statues Also Fall in Love at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, and curated numerous group projects, including: The Third Room at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Polish New Wave: The History of the Phenomenon That Never Existed at Tate Modern, London (together with Stuart Comer and Łukasz Ronduda); Warhol, People and Things at Casa São Roque, Porto (together with Alaina Feldman).

Piwowarska is also the author and editor of numerous books: Jadwiga Maziarska: Atlas of the Imaginary, Kolekcjonowanie swiata. Jadwiga Maziarska. Listy i szkice, Star City: The Future Under Communism (together with Alex Farquharson and Łukasz Ronduda); Erna Rosenstein: I Can Repeat Only Unconsciously (together with Dorota Jarecka); Footnote 14: Angel of History.

In 2017 Piwowarska was curator of the Polish Pavilion for the 57th Venice Biennale, featuring Little Review by Sharon Lockhart. From 2019–2024 she was the Artistic Director of Casa São Roque – Centro de Arte in Porto, where she organized, among other exhibitions: Ana Jotta Inventória and Jean-Luc Moulène Técnico Libertário. In 2024 she joined the team of Muzeum Susch as Curator of OBJEKTIV.

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