Vladimir Baranski, Man 10 cycle I

patinated bronze, 18.00 x 15.00 x 10.00 cm

Włodzimierz Barański was born in Gardea in 1947. He graduated from the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The artist's works have been presented at numerous individual and collective exhibitions, both at home and abroad. Starting from the exhibition of distinguished diplomas at Warsaw's Zachęta gallery in 1975 and the 15th Debut of Graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts at the Stara Kordegarda, through the awarded participation in the competition "60th Anniversary of the Wielkopolska Uprising in the Visual Arts," to group exhibitions in Poznań, Wrocław and Toruń and individual exhibitions in Warsaw and Legionowo. Baranski's sculptures have been hosted in Hungary (Budapest, group exhibition), Switzerland (Basel, group exhibition), Germany (Munster, Bielefeld, individual exhibitions; Minden, group exhibition). In 1992, the sculptor received a two-year creative scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and Art, a year later he began teaching (drawing, painting, sculpture), and as an animator of visual arts activities he cooperated with the Center for Culture and Education in Warsaw. One of his sculptures was chosen for the Golden Card statuette for the most outstanding artists of Polish culture. His works are in collectors' collections in Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States. The essence of the artist's work was tried to capture by Stefan Szydlowski, writing: (...) Premeditation in the well-material bronze and stone reflects an awareness of the choice of the area of artistic exploration. The sculptor does not problematize the individual values of European culture, but its present form as a whole. The cultural legacy in his works, saturated with symbols and full of expression, is presented as something heavy and anachronistic. The subject of Vladimir Baranski's work is human life in its fundamental dimension, morality. The artist shows that the awareness of the attributive nature of morality wings people, but these wings once made of bronze bound by historicity and the turns of human fate weigh as much as one has lived, and once made of glass, "invisible" as consciousness, the impassable horizon of human loneliness, as thought, which is easily disfigured or destroyed. And today's shape of freedom, according to the artist, people must seek between good and evil. As in the past, and today, neither happiness and beauty, nor wealth and stupidity can replace it.