material paper, etching
size 81 x 75 cm
Painter, printmaker, she mainly practices metal techniques (etching, aquatint, chipping) and lithography. She also occasionally works with art books. She was born in 1946 in Rybnik.
She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, first at the Faculty of Painting, in the studio of Prof. Jan Świderski, and then at the Faculty of Graphic Arts in the studios of Prof. Mieczysław Wejman - her future father-in-law - and Prof. Włodzimierz Kunz. In 1972 she completed her diploma - in graphic design under the supervision of Prof. Witold Skulicz and in lithography under Prof. Włodzimierz Kunz. She primarily practices metal techniques (etching, aquatint, splatter) and lithography. He also occasionally deals with art books.
In 1986, together with Eugeniusz Get Stankiewicz, she reactivated the STU Theater Gallery on Bracka Street in Cracow. One of the fruits of this activity was the creation of the so-called Gallery of Large Paintings, realized on 6 x 8 m canvases by many outstanding artists. These works were exhibited outdoors, in the urban space of Krakow's Krasinsky Avenue.
In fact, all of Anna Sobol-Wejman's work could be called by the title of one of her series - Diary of an Inner Life. Jan Fejkiel refers to these works with the words:
"The artist does not actually describe reality, but collects its material traces and shards of meaning. Thus, she avoids the didacticism and moralizing inevitably associated with history-making, storytelling, anecdotes. The works are devoid of traditional drama and its tensions. (...) The open space of printmaking allows a multi-threaded narrative, where the continuity of events is conventional, and history is naturally intertwined with the present, material fact with the record of thoughts, consciousness with the subconscious."
The artist's early works - with titles such as Inventory, Pieces of the Whole, Gazette, City, Everyday, Hours, Days and Years - were seen by critics as a look at the world from a distance, an attempt at a holistic metaphor (Krystyna Czerni). In subsequent engravings, the scale changed, as did the point of view - the "depicted world" was captured from a closer perspective, as if the lens of graphic vision was set to a macro function. The artist was increasingly preoccupied with the periphery of reality, its margins (Peripheries, 1996; Cloakroom, Storage Room).
She records the world with her own calligraphy - shaky, ephemerally entangling in the background and fading into it, then again tectonically blunt, primal in its own way (Museum, etching, aquatint, 2002), although only seemingly associated with childish awkwardness. Her succinct ideograms, simplified silhouettes, letters drawn as if with an awkward hand or mysterious signs are each time linked to the plastic matter of the environment, the texture of the background and the compositional structure. The artist often juxtaposes in a single work sequences of several, a dozen or even several hundred (OVA - Omnia Vincit Amor, 1996, etching, aquatint) modules, panels or metopes, developing into frieze-like, horizontal graphic stories; less often - vertical "review boards", tableaux serving to penetrate into semi-secret knowledge, anchored in the author's existential experiences.
