Garden Sculptures. Hanna Rechowicz, Bolesław and Maria Cybis

Garden sculptures. Hanna Rechowicz, Bolesław and Maria Cybis
2–23 October 2016
Opening: 2nd of October 2016, 6 p.m.

The exhibition presents drawings, maquettes and models – the result of two-year cooperation between Hanna Rechowicz and Jan Strumiłło, who have been working on a new arrangement of sculptures by Bolesław and Maria Cybis for the Królikarnia Sculpture Garden.

The set of concrete sculptures by Bolesław (1895‒1957) and Maria (1906‒1958) Cybis was initially located in their garden in Placówka, in the Warsaw Bielany district. After coming back from a trip to Italy and North Africa that they undertook in 1930 together with Jan Zamoyski, the painter and his wife – pot maker – made for themselves over twenty full-blown works. Their imagination, stimulated by the journey and – in case of Bolesław – combined with his memories from Istanbul, where he worked for three years as a young man (1920‒1923), produced a series of paintings of African women and a series of sculptures, blending together exotic and European motifs: from a well casing decorated with reliefs and stone slabs with floral motifs, to 2-meter high nudes of women with exotic facial features placed against the walls, a ram supporting a mosaic column with a capitel ornamented with faces of elf-like girls, and a procession of dancing putti.

Bolesław Cybis, known, most of all, as the author of one painting dealing with the topic of girls' eroticism, entitled Primavera (1936), had a strong position in the interwar art world, which was confirmed by assignments to paint frescos for the interiors of famous Polish transatlantic ships and his participation in the world fairs in Paris, 1937, and New York in 1939. Nonetheless, at the beginning of his visual arts education in the Kharkiv School of Fine Arts he was fascinated with sculpture. He showed his full-round works in 1918 at the exhibition of Związek Siedmiu (Association of the Seven), of which he was a member. Since his return to Warsaw in 1923, he also cooperated with the pottery studio "Andrzej Wojnacki-Kazimierz Czechowski". Therefore, the sculptural garden fantasies that he developed together with Maria as a mature painter resulted from his initial interests and skills – practiced as something additional and also for profit.

Maria and Bolesław Cybis left their garden in Placówka in 1939. In spring they travelled to the New York World's Fair, bringing with them seven monumental paintings about the history of Poland painted collectively by the Brotherhood of St. Luke, of which Bolesław Cybis was a member; moreover, they created two new frescos together on site. The war began while they were in New York, and their family took care of their garden in Placówka. In 1974, over fifteen years after the artists' death, a new Copper Processing Plant, later known as the Warsaw Metal Mill (Walcownia Metali Warszawa) was built on the lot that had belonged to the Cybis, and their sculptures were passed to the National Museum in Warsaw. Since that time, they were stored on the Stanisław Lorentz patio that used to be closed at that time and was made available to the public only during the painter's monographic exhibition in 2002. Eight years later, the sculptures were transported to the Królikarnia parking lot, where they remain until today.

A decade later, in 2014, we invited the architect Jan Strumiłło and the renowned scenographer and landscape architect Hanna Rechowicz (born 1926) to cooperate on this set of sculptures. Hanna Rechowicz, together with her husband, Gabriel Rechowicz,  designed many works in the 1970s, such as the legendary large format mosaics in Dom Chłopa, spatial compositions in Supersam and also numerous bold garden designs both for communist state institutions and for private, often foreign owners. One of the exceptional works of this couple is their own house and garden at Lekarska street in Warsaw, transformed in accordance with the logic of surreal fantasy, escaping the criteria of usefulness and ergonomy. The entrance to the garden is overgrown with vegetation, balls made of ladles dangle from branches of climbing or creeping plants, and there is a sculpture in the corner, "growing" out of cement foundation – a trunk with protruding crooked metal bars. Between the garden and mundane reality there is a short wall with wavy shapes on every surface, colonized by embedded pebbles. The histories of those two gardens – belonging to the Cybis and the Rechowicz, both of them transformed by art – meet in the Sculpture Park of Królikarnia, where artistic gestures replace the work of a gardener on similar rights. Elżbieta Jabłońska organises "Nieużytki sztuki" ("Art's Wasteland") – renting planter boxes at the museum to grow flowers, vegetables and herbs, while Agnieszka Brzeżańska uses sculpture-like structures to support the branches of an apple tree heavy with fruit.  

When planning the new arrangement of concrete sculptures, we had to deal with their state of conservation. Cracks, grooves and worn-out surfaces are the nightmare of museum professionals, but at the same time they tempt and fascinate the artists. The works by Hanna Rechowicz include a tree trunk struck by lightning, a cracked violin, as well as the deteriorated sculptures of the Cybis. Those two approaches must fit within the museum, which is why Jan Strumiłło, in his architectural drawings, has proposed an arrangement for the Cybis' sculptures that protects their historical matter, at the same time permitting Hanna Rechowicz to orchestrate a romantic ruin intervention through paintings and mosaics.

When thinking on the new arrangement of the Cybis' sculptures, intriguing cooperation was born, blurring the boundaries of authorship between living and departed artists of different professions: a painter, a potter, creators of mosaics and frescos, and architects. This, in turn, inspired an avalanche of questions about the ethical limits of the work of museum professionals. Can they entrust the works of a departed artist to another one? Where are the limits between the architecture of an exhibition, a lapidarium and an original installation? Which element of the museum's mission is more important: protecting the historical matter or providing an update to its meaning?

Archive works: Hanna and Gabriel Rechowiczowie
Sculptures set design: Hanna Rechowicz and Jan Strumiłło
Maquettes and exhibition's architecture: Hanna Rechowicz and Bazyli Piątkowski
Curator: Katarzyna Kucharska-Hornung
Graphic design: Anna Piwowar

Free admission.