Critical textWanda Czełkowska

Wanda Czełkowska (1930, Brest – 2021, Warsaw) studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków in the same years (1949–54) when the doctrine of socialist realism in art was imposed by the communist regime. While her medium was sculpture and her most recurrent motif was that of the Head, she never adhered to those tenets: her practice can be considered intimately conceptual, and her works (either sculptures, paintings, drawings or installations) reflect that. This aspect of her approach to art became evident at the beginning of the 1970s, when she decided to push the boundaries of the traditional notion of sculpture up to its absolute elimination, as in her monumental work Bezwzględne wyeliminowanie rzeźby jako pojęcia kształtu (Absolute Elimination of Sculpture as a Notion of Shape), produced in 1972 and thus perfectly attuned with the debates on the dematerialization of art taking place around the world at the time. Czełkowska was a key figure of the Polish avant-garde, participating in the Second Kraków group alongside Tadeusz Kantor and other leading artists of the time, and took part in countless exhibitions both in Poland and abroad. She referred to herself as a professional sculptor (not sculptress) and demanded to be treated equally to male artists. It is telling that, despite her relevance in the Polish scene of the second half of the twentieth century, the first important retrospective of her work was only held in 2016, when she was 86.