Jerzy Wroński — pictures-reliefs, metamorphic watercolours, and soot graphs
catalogue ‘Jerzy Wroński — pictures/reliefs, metamorphic watercolours and soot graphs’ The retrospective catalogue of a renowned Silesian artist. It is a compendious presentation of the artist's works completed within the last 30 years....
Jerzy Wroński — Professor of plastic arts, the graduate of the faculty of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow. As early as during his studies he co-created with his friends an artistic Nowa Huta Group which inaugurated the trend of material painting in Cracow. All its members would belong later to the Artistic Association Cracow Group. In the years 1979-1995 Jerzy Wroński was the president of that Association. Earlier he was a member of the board of the Cracow District of the Union of Polish Artists and Designers for a few terms and of the artistic board of the General Board of the Union of Polish Artists and Designers. Since 1960 he has thought artistic topics as a professor, at first in Cracow, then at the Maria Skłodowska-Curie University in Lublin, and since 1975 at the Silesian University in Cieszyn.
Jerzy Wroński’s over fifty year long artistic activity was a sequence of experiences in which he has been revealing the inherent creative potential of elementary natural processes. Such was the case of his monochromatic pictures/reliefs, appearing in late 50s and shaped with the use of flame creeping along hardboard. The same was with later metamorphic watercolours and diffusion drawings, where the role of prime mover was played by another element, water, even if used in microscopic volumes.
In result of those experiences these two antagonistic elements have been joined together in one creative process. His metamorphic photographs which he later would call soot graphs started to appear in the middle of the 80s. They were the result of his discovery of unusual features of soot particles which settle on a piece of glass wetted with water and placed above the flame of a candle. In effect of the clash between two elements — fire and water – superficial tensions and tectonic transformations appear in the microscopic soot layer. These structures of sophisticated invention are the negatives of the images that emerge from nothingness.
The exhibition, organised in collaboration with the Nowa Huta Cultural Centre and the Open Studio gallery, presents for the first time ever the collection of works of all the stages of the artist’s activity.
