The widespread unawareness of Krystyna Michałowska-Podsiadły’s artistic legacy serves as a point of departure for a conversation about devotion, sacrifice, compromise, motherhood, the forgetting of women, and the marginalization of female artists. The exhibition Some People Don’t Remember the Color of Their Mother’s Eyes presents a broad selection of Michałowska-Podsiadły’s surviving works, alongside a two-channel video installation by Alicja Kielan and Ilona Witkowska.
Krystyna Michałowska-Podsiadły in her studio at Ofiar Oświęcimskich street in 60’s, photo. Natalia LL, from the collection of Magda Podsiadły
As part of the 15% of Abstraction series, this exhibition revisits the life and traces of the work of Krystyna Michałowska-Podsiadły (1936–2005), a graduate of the Wrocław State Higher School of Fine Arts (PWSSP). Only a few canvases, two folders of drawings and sketches, and several pieces of applied art remain after this remarkably intriguing artist.
title unknown, Krystyna Michałowska-Podsiadły, mixed media, from the collection of Magda Podsiadły.
It is precisely these remnants—or rather, the absence of a more extensive body of work—that become the starting point for a film created by Wrocław-based photographer Alicja Kielan and poet Ilona Witkowska. Collaborating for the first time, the artists invited members of the local community to engage in a conversation about an artist whose work most of them had never encountered. Their inspiration stems from the work of Rineke Dijkstra, though they invert her approach: instead of people unfamiliar with art commenting on masterpieces, the artists invite reflection on the work of someone nearly erased from collective memory.
