Jadwiga Maziarska (1913 Sosnowiec - 2003 Modlniczka near Kraków), "Diary," 1949

Biography
She studied law for a year at Stefan Batory University in Vilnius. In 1933 she began her art studies at the Alfred Terlecki Private School of Painting in Cracow. She continued them in 1934-39 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow under Władysław Jarocki, Stefan Filipkiewicz and Ignacy Pieńkowski. Since 1945, she was a member of the Young Visual Artists Group, and since 1957 - of the then reactivated Krakow Group. She participated in three Exhibitions of Modern Art (Krakow 1948-49, Warsaw 1957 and 1959). Problems of the structure of a work of art were to prove decisive for the artist's work. First she experimented with applying thick layers of pigment 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 overtaken by an almost childlike joy of juxtaposing bright colors. In 1991, her retrospective monographic exhibition took place at Krakow's Krzysztofory gallery.