oil, canvas, 60 x 50 cm, signed on the reverse: 'Anna Güntner'.
In 1952-57 she studied at the Faculty of Painting of the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, where in 1958 she defended her diploma in the studio of Prof. Zbigniew Pronaszko. In 1964 she received an Art Scholarship from the French Government in Paris, and in 1979 a scholarship from the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York. She lived and worked in Cracow, and in 1974 was awarded a badge "For creative work for the city of Cracow." Her works have been exhibited at national and international exhibitions in Los Angeles, Szczecin, Krakow, Warsaw, New York, Milan, Santa Barbara and Brussels, among others. They are in the collections of major Polish museums and private collections around the world. She ended her creative work in 1984, never to return to painting after that, leaving behind just over 140 works we know. Her works, which balance on the border between surrealism, symbolism and fantasy art, attract with magical metaphors that are hidden in idyllic landscapes, in scaled-down everyday objects and in the large mysterious eyes of the paintings' naked protagonists.
LITERATURE:
- Anna Güntner, Painting, Cracow 1967, p. 12 (il.).
- Anna Güntner, Painting, Nowa Huta Cultural Center, Artemis Art Gallery, Cracow 2021, 124-125 (il.).
EXHIBITED:
Anna Güntner, Painting, Zachęta Central Office of Art Exhibitions, 1967
"Anna Güntnerhas two main subjects: compositions with a naked blonde or a naked pair of young peers in a landscape and overscaled machines, shown against a similar landscape, idyllic, pre-industrial and reminiscent of old painting. The machines are sometimes friendly, like those for writing or sewing, but more often they seem to be used for torture and killing. The Secret Facility (1965), a cross between a rocket and a coffee grinder in an area surrounded by electrified barbed wire, looks like a death machine. Nothing good awaits the people led to the machine."
Ewa Kuryluk, A Phone Call to a Prince and a Brushmate. The Finale of Surrealism, [in:] Anna Güntner, Painting, Nowa Huta Cultural Center, Artemis Art Gallery, Krakow 2021, p. 22.
"Take a closer look at the giant samovar (Project, 1963) in the sub-Italian-Renaissance landscape of Krakow and the coffee grinder (Secret Object, 1965) in an analogous view. These are the times of the conquest of space, visits by Gagarin and Tereshkova, and gossip sensations about a UFO landing here and there. In the aforementioned paintings, the action in the lower part of the composition is interesting. At the base of the "space" samovar, an authority with a rifle forbids civilians to approach the object. Only notables have the right to enter. In the composition with the mill, the area is surrounded by barbed wire and law enforcement forces. At the time of the creation of these paintings, when we loved political allusions in art, it was also possible to make such associations that a Russian samovar, the pinnacle of the USSR's technical capabilities, landed at our place as a UFO. When asked if this is about that. ANIA would certainly answer as usual: It is possible."
Tadeusz Rylko, ANIA, [in:] Anna Güntner, Painting, Nowa Huta Cultural Center, Artemis Art Gallery, Krakow 2021, p. 44.
