Polish Contemporary Sculpture [antikvár]

Unwanted but necessary, incomprehensible but dealing with matters of the highest importance, disregarded but significant, sculpture is developing and blossoming as never before in this country. Several hundred active and capable artists sculpt "in order to leave an impression on the passing days, in order to understand and portray our world," wrote one of them, Olgierd Truszynski. They often use clay or plaster which are malleable and quick to work with but do not warrant a long life to the ideas expressed through them. Over the centuries sculpture has moulded social tastes and served as a vehicle for religious, political and social ideas. Today there exist other, more efficient means of influencing people, and that may be the reason why sculpture has so easily been relegated to the background. Also its tradi- tional ties with architecture have been weakened. But in an emancipated form sculpture still takes part oc- casionally in urban composition, albeit as a supplementary decoration, not as an element designed and developing together with architecture, industrial design is still done on too small a scale, in spite of the need for it, creating as it does such an obvious possibility of making our environment more beautiful. It is to the credit of those sculptors who have preserved the now unfashionable consciousness of the social role and potentialities hidden in sculpture, that many exhibitions and symposia are held, open-air schools organized, ideas embodied in durable material, and new fields of inspiration sought. The most important things in sculpture happen in studios: there, the most interest- ing ideas are born and there they sometimes die ; there, the final effects of overcoming the resistance of the material or simply some technical difficulty, emerge. Not many of them leave the studio to play the role assigned them by their creator on a proper scale and in a durable material. Monuments, spatial forms, sometimes ornamental sculptures in parks, mark mo- ments of victory. Through them sculpture gains institutional agreement for making people accustomed to it, forcing them to look at, or even to protest. Of great importance to Polish sculpture is the Biennaie of Spatial Forms held since 1965 at Elbl^g. Every two years, the Engineering Works at Elblqg become for a few months a factory of sculpture in metal. The annual symposia held at Putawy under the patronage of the Nitrogen Factory, and the open-air summer schools at Oronsko and Hajnówka, are evidence that victories for sculpture are pos- sible albeit short-lived. From the varied and complex picture of Polish contemporary sculpture I have selected for more detailed discussion those trends and artists whose creativeness, entirely within the time span of the past twenty-five years, seems to point the directions of future development. In accordance with the principle of representing each artist by a few works, to show