The retrospective exhibition showcases the artistic practice and philosophy of Bożenna Biskupska: a paintress, sculptress, installation and interdisciplinary artist and also the co-founder of the International Cultural Laboratory at Sokołowsko.
Since her debut in the late 1970s-early 1980s, Biskupska has continued working independently of changing tendencies and trends and has developed her unique and original but at the same time universal artistic language. She has constructed it of such basic elements as line, trace, sign, and figure. It recalls the elemental “speak” of the earth: geological formations, plants, bodies of living creatures and nature’s inanimate creations. It does not need words: her artistic discourse reverberates in matter, its physicality, structure, and presence. Form is its syntax and rhythm is its grammar. She uses this language to demark the image of time and space in which the existential spectacle enfolds.
While her art is manifestly free of journalistic concerns, she has not turned her back to reality. Biskupska’s artistic practice is founded on her faith in art as a special way of establishing relationships with nature, time, and space, and also with and between people. Her artistic pursuits and also her meta-artistic activity at Sokołowsko, in which she has engaged for almost twenty years now, are rooted in this philosophy that exceeds stylistic categories and artistic conventions. In 2007, together with artist Zygmunt Rytka, she co-founded the International Cultural Laboratory at the historic health resort Sokołowsko in Lower Silesia: this independent institution has since grown into a unique international phenomenon.
The exhibition Bożenna Biskupska. The Artist and Possible Construction approaches the Sokołowsko project as a communal sculpture, an integral part of her oeuvre, alongside installations, paintings, and multi-figure sculptural series. Biskupska’s art enfolds in spaces where thought materializes to be shared. The idea of sharing also informs her activity at Sokołowsko aimed at creating the physical and symbolic space(s) for communal practicing and experiencing art. For this reason exhibition also features works by other artists invited by Biskupska to honour and share the spirit of collaboration, hospitality, generosity, and art as a field for experimentation.
The exhibition starts with works from the Demarcation of the Image series – a work-in-progress that she has continued for almost three decades in various media as an open text describing the world. The exhibition closes with the immersive installation Possible Construction_Encounter featuring an architectural structure evoked using multimedia projections. It is both a design for a future project and a representation of the idea of art understood as a space of potentiality: a place where we all can meet.