Jadwiga MAZIARSKA (1913-2003), Character; 1971

gouache, pencil, crayon, own technique, paper; 60 x 41cm
Signed, dated, l. d.: Jadwiga Maziarska 1971

In 1933, she began her artistic studies at Alfred Terlecki's Private Painting School in Cracow and continued them from 1934-1939 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow under the direction of Władysław Jarocki, Stefan Filipkiewicz and Ignacy Pieńkowski. After World War II, she joined the Cracow Group of Young Visual Artists, and in 1957 participated in the reactivation of the Cracow Group. She belonged to the circle of artists gathered around Tadeusz Kantor. At first she experimented with applying thick layers of paint to canvas. In 1947, she made her first appliqué - a work of different-colored fabric fragments of irregular shapes. In her structural compositions, she did not focus only on the formal and technological side, but also gave them allusive titles. They suggested a desire to connect through art with the univocity of human imaginations, premonitions and longings. Later came an interesting series of paintings made using the technique of combining oil paint with stearin. The stearin compositions exposed not only texture but also rhythm, which dynamized but also harmonized the surface of the canvas. In the 1970s she stopped creating them, focusing on painting more decisive compositions that were uniform in texture and limited in color (sometimes only to black and white). She underwent another metamorphosis in the 1990s, when her painting was mastered by an almost childlike joy of juxtaposing bright colors. A monographic exhibition of Jadwiga Maziarska was held at the Center for Contemporary Art at the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw in 2009.