Gallery 1
July 21 - September 17, 2000

The display is composed of a series of ‘works on paper’ and publications by the Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, along with a representation of the Polish concrete poetry produced by a group of artists originating from the milieu of Wroclaw-based avant-garde of 1970’s. The exhibitions are linked with the personage of Stanislaw Drózdz, an illustrious artist and animator of the Concretistic movement in Poland, who has for several years thriftily gathered an archive of the achievements of Polish and international ‘concrete poetry’.

‘Concrete poetry’ is a current of experimental poetry directed towards a radical evolution of language. The adjective ‘concrete’ is to indicate the type of poetic text which is due to constitute an instance of self-communication, deprived of external references, being a system of self-signifiers, in other words - a concrete ‘fact’. Such poetry is situated on the borderline of visual arts (using, in the first place, signs - in the visual sphere), music (sounds composing sonic poetry/concrete music), and literature (using the Word, deprived, however, of any outward reference). The sources of concrete poetry are to be found in the output of the dadaists’ movement, but conscious experimenting towards this direction, determined by definitions of the current, was commenced in 1950’s, in Europe (Eugen Gomringer, the harbinger of the trend) and South America (brothers Augusto and Horaldo de Campos - members of the Brazilian ‘Noihandres’ group).

Precisely sketched ship models, fishing boats and inscriptions concerning navigation, as may be associated with the space of the sky and the universe - such is the poetic proposal of I. H. Finlay whose works are tempting with their tasteful colours and noble simplicity. Literary inscriptions sculpted in stone and Classicist silhouettes of sculptures well blended into the landscape testify to the author’s delight with classic art whilst simultaneously presenting an artist who renders real the futurists’ daydreams about ‘words in space’ being set free. The priority of word in Finlay’s art refers to poetic origins of his creative work. Active ever since the late fifties with the ‘concrete poetry’ movement, he is the founder of the Wild Hawthorn Press publishing house, producing books, prints and volumes of verse. However, his best known work is the Small Sparta, a garden he has created together with his wife Sue on a farm in Scotland. This private landscape park, reminding one of Poussin’s Arcadia, is the author’s enclave. The beauty of classicizing sculptures combined with poetic inscriptions sculpted in stone, has turned the Scottish landscape into a series of after-images of painted landscapes by Corot, Poussin, Altdorfer or Fragonard. There, one may meet the most important artistic and philosophical motifs in the author’s output. The creation of Finlay’s Sparta and problems connected with it have been, in a somewhat funny manner, illustrated with the publications displayed in the show-cases: the brochure entitled One Bridge Too Far and a newspaper containing, among other things, an Illustrated Dictionary of the Small Spartan War.

In parallel to Finlay’s works, made in 1970’s, Polish ‘concrete artists’ developed their concepts. The works presented in the exhibition testify to a variety of artistic motifs, referring to avant-garde achievements of experimental poetry, which have become part of the Polish concrete poetry. The distinctive thing about all the works on display is their authors’ assumption of one starting point being a sign, a letter, or, a word.

The works of Stanislaw Drózdz, of which you can see the largest representation, show words within space (miedzy [between], przez [through], w [in]), as well as graphic compositions of letters on a plane, organising the space around themselves (miedzy, kolo [circle]).

The condensed compositions by Marianna Bocian, made of signs piled up in columns, signs and sequences of letters, mechanically written at first glance, constitute graphic symbols ascribed to transitoriness and death. Yellowed slips of paper dating back to the seventies make them similar to compositions in some Renaissance epitaphs, reminding us of how fragile and transient our lives are.

Zegar [Clock] by Marzena Kosinska measures the passing time: ‘FROM - TO’. Equally chary as to form, the maszynopisy [typescripts] by Roman Gorzelski are pieces of verse made with the use of single letters, punctuation marks or mathematical symbols.

The basic colours appearing in written (printed) texts, the white of paper and the black of letters, have been the source of inspiration for Barbara Kozlowska to make her compositions of the words: snieg [snow] (projected with a projector onto the wall) and czarne [black] (inscribed on the wall), which overlap until they both create an absolute black.

The works of Grzegorz Kolasinski, closest of all to classical lithography, resemble an artist’s notebook bearing a track record of notes, sketches and drawings, making altogether dynamic, abstract compositions.

In his painted compositions of the cycle zygzaki [zigzags], being a series of compilations of the letter ‘z’, Michal Bieganowski highlights in an expressive manner, with colour, the presence of his works within the exhibition whose subject-matter is linguistic signs: letters, words...

Zbigniew Makarewicz presents, in his work VISIBILIUM, a graphic interpretation of a text in which letters have been replaced with punctuation marks. Boguslaw Michnik’s composition of photographs showing objects in space, with a strong chiaroscuro, which may be identified as letters composing the word fotografia [photography], is an attempt at rendering (the) word spacious, and an incentive for the viewer to respond to a certain game thus proposed.

The figure of Wojciech Sztukowski, one of the most active Wroclaw avant-garde animators and theorists, is documented by xerox-copies of photographic prints along with his text describing the activities of two galleries: the ‘Zaklad nad Fosa’ and the ‘Osrodek Dzialan Plastycznych’ [Centre for Visual-Artistic Actions].

Krzysztof Morcinek