The exhibition Układ współrzędnych (Coordinate System) continues a cycle of shows held for several years at the Geppert Apartment, confronting the work of artists associated with the Wrocław avant-garde with that of contemporary creators. Works by Daniela Tagowska and Przemek Pintal enter into a dialogue with selected pieces by the now-deceased artists Zdzisław Jurkiewicz and Maria Michałowska. The axis of the exhibition is formed by Jurkiewicz’s archival photocollages, as well as a graphic motif referencing Michałowska’s work. The exhibition as a whole constitutes a kind of tribute to these two outstanding artistic personalities and their oeuvre.
The common denominator of the presentation of the four artists is drawing and drawing-based objects as a distinctive and often quite intimate mode of expression. Drawing—arguably the most intermedial, intimate, and adaptive of media—constitutes an important focus of Pintal’s and Tagowska’s artistic, pedagogical, and curatorial activity. Since 2015 they have coordinated the International Drawing Triennial and have taught drawing and intermedial courses at the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław.
Like Jurkiewicz and Michałowska, Pintal and Tagowska form a couple in private life, in which the presence of an artistic ethos and the need to create result in a constant interpenetration of the personal and the professional. The exhibition at the Geppert Apartment thus examines mutual influences within the work of artists who are also life partners. Of central importance, however, are certain affinities in the nature of their artistic inquiries and in the means of expression they employ—where the chaos of rapid notations meets an ordered, lucid, and concrete-art-adjacent mode of abstract thinking.
Daniela Tagowska’s actions, corresponding with Michałowska’s work, despite their seemingly light, sketch-like form, are marked by a particular monumentalism. A symmetrical, quasi-herbarium refers to physical culture as well as to the grueling, precision-demanding labor of an athlete striving to achieve perfect fitness. The metaphysics of the cult of the body, present in culture for millennia, unsettlingly disrupts Michałowska’s compact, transcendent, and seemingly final form.
A similar dynamic characterizes the relationship between Przemek Pintal’s interventions and the figure and work of Jurkiewicz. As Pintal himself says, he refers not to Jurkiewicz-the-artist, but to “a guy with a big heart and boundless imagination—a romantic, a rascal, a boy, a trickster.” A focus on everyday objects and activities; closeness to and tenderness toward plants and animals; and, finally, an interest in the intangible, the contentious, and the seemingly ridiculous (such as stories about UFOs) culminate in the poem Hope—here scattered into words and letters, unreadable.
The conversation unfolding in Układ współrzędnych thus concerns both the smallest matters and the greatest things. In the tension between these two poles, it seeks to grasp and describe the effort ceaselessly invested in attaining—literally and metaphorically understood, yet still elusive—form.
