To accompany Project Space’s exhibition Stage and Twist, artist, teacher and art critic Grzegorz Kowalski will be talking about his well-known teaching methods at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, illustrating his presentation with works by former students including Anna Molska and Artur Żmijewski.
Between 1959 and 1965 Kowalski studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw under Oskar Hansen and Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz. While a student he volunteered as a teaching assistant in the studio of Hansen, thus beginning an educational career at his alma mater that persists to this day. In 1985, following the retirement of professor Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Kowalski took over as head of the Sculpture Department diploma studio and became professor in 1991.
His artistic stance was shaped under the influence of Oskar Hansen's theory of the 'Open Form'. Early in his career (1965-1970) he was active within the movement of avant-garde symposiums and ‘plein-airs’, which was significant in breadth at the time and characterized by both an experimental and social agenda. Among others Kowalski took part in the Symposium of Artists and Scientists in Puławy in 1966, the 2nd Biennale of Spatial Forms in Elblag in 1967, the international symposium of sculptors during the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, and the Wrocław '70 Symposium. He had his solo debut in 1968 with the installation Kieszeń / Pocket at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw. Soon afterwards he suffered a crisis of confidence and lost his previously held belief in the power of art to influence social processes. This, coupled with his newly found awareness of the disproportion between his creative intentions and the possibilities for realizing them, prompted Kowalski to seek and obtain a scholarship to travel to the United States, where he stayed for one academic year (1970-1971).
Throughout his second period (1972-1980) Kowalski remained linked primarily with the Repassage Gallery, in which the artist found conditions appropriate for, as he put it, 'practicing freedom' in the face of the censorship and political oppression that reigned on the outside. His works from this period were of two types. The first took the form of photographic tableaux that depicted interpersonal actions or designs for them and included Kompozycja horyzontalna / Horizontal Composition from 1972, a series of 'photographic objects' 1972-1974, Buty / Shoes 1975, and Krzesło / Chair 1974-1975. The second were artistic actions in pure form, one-off events like Odbitka / Print 1977, Kompilacja / Compilation 1977, Trawa / Grass 1978, or long-term question-provoked actions like "Czy mógłbyś i czy chciałbyś wcielić się w zwierzę przed obiektywem?" / "Could You and Would You Like To Become an Animal in Front of the Camera?" 1978, "Czy mógłbyś i czy chciałbyś potraktować mnie jako przedmiot?" / "Could You and Would You Like To Treat Me Like An Object?" 1979, and "Czy chciałbyś wrócić do łona matki?" / "Would You Like to Return to Your Mother's Womb?" 1981-1987. Both in the first and the second, the artist incorporated viewers into the work as partners.
Kowalski transferred this method of artistic endeavor to his teaching activities. In its mature form, a series of classes titled Obszar wspólny / Obszar własny / A Common Space / Individual Space (beginning with the 1981/82 academic year), it constituted an important current within Kowalski's third period of creativity, which began in 1980. In the 1990s, drawing on his students educated in the spirit of 'education in partnership', Kowalski created an informal artistic group known as Pracownia Kowalskiego / Kowalski's Workshop (or Kowalnia / The Smithy), which included Paweł Althamer, Katarzyna Górna, Katarzyna Kozyra, Mariusz Maciejewski, Jacek Markiewicz, Monika Zielińska, and Artur Żmijewski.
Grzegorz Kowalski is also involved in some curatorial activities. In 1991 he assembled an original exhibition titled Magowie i mistycy / Magicians and Mystics at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. This was followed in 1993 by an addition to the Repassage Gallery retrospective at the Zacheta Gallery devoted to the political activities of the "people of the gallery", and in the year 2000 by an exhibition titled Wojna w człowieku / War Within Man at theCenter of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko.
Author: Maryla Sitkowska, Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, December 2001.