In this section of the exhibition, we revisit The One-Legged figure, from the motif’s first appearance in Bożenna Biskupska’s iconography. We pay an imaginary visit to the artist’s studio at Sokołowsko in Lower Silesia, where she has lived and worked for the last two decades.
The One-Legged first appears in Biskupska’s paintings in the mid-1980s. In 1987, she makes the first sculpted figure, suspended between corporeality and the realm of signs, ideograms, and hieroglyphs. The sculpture is coloured a deep ultramarine blue. The colour is highly symbolic: royal, sacred, celestial, divine, alluding to infinity. And indeed, The One-Legged is a project-in-progress, an open work, a recurrent motif revisited by the artist in various media and materials, subject to multiplications and transformations. These metamorphoses originate in the artist’s studio where intuitions are visualized in the form of drawings and given their first material shape. Some, like Tectonics, are singular realizations, others would over time develop into extended cycles. The architectural installation Possible Construction_ Encounter, featured in this section of the exhibition, has been intended as the start of a bigger project. The International Cultural Laboratory at Sokołowsko, making an appearance in the video series Chasing Thoughts Away, is the artist’s lifelong meta-project. This unique institution is a kind of communal sculpture and open art studio, not only the site of the founder’s individual artistic practice but also a space shared with others, a platform for collective creativity.