EXHIBITION: Maria Papa Rostkowska "La passion de la sculpture"
The exhibition at the Polish Library in Paris, an institution with a grand Polish-French tradition, comes as another step of the quest for analysing and propagating Maria Papa Rostkowska’s work.
The show gathers almost thirty sculptures of terracotta, bronze and marble – works that represent various periods of the artist’s creative practice. Sturdy free-standing forms shaped with colour stones have been counterbalanced by black and white photographs by Eustachy Kossakowski, an outstanding photographer bound with Warsaw and Paris, akin to Rostkowska. Emanating classic simplicity, the minimalist images that document Rostkowska’s work were created in the early 1970s at the artist’s studio, her Paris apartment and in the streets of the city. Portraying the sculptural forms and light reflected by their bronze and stone surfaces, the images highlight the powerful and mysterious appeal of Maria Papa’s sculptures; at the same time, they are works of art in their own right. Friendships, exchanging thoughts and opinions, working together – those were the essential aspects of the artist’s life. Traces of her relationships have been preserved in letters and works offered to Maria by her outstanding friends: Serge Poliakoff, Marino Marini or Juan Mirò. Those bits of the past, alongside the archival volumes of the magazine “XXe Siècle”, form an appendix to the exhibition, a section that demonstrates the proximity of her life to the heart of her epoch’s art world. Maria Papa Rostkowska experienced some of the dreadful cruelties that Europe suffered in the 20th century; on the other hand, she profited from the entirely new territories of creative and personal liberty that her extraordinary century opened up.
Exhibition organised by: The Historical and Literary Society and Polish Library in Paris
Co-organiser: Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at the Królikarnia Palace
The first retrospective of works by Maria Papa Rostkowska was held at the Królikarnia Palace in 2014
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