Maria Michałowska actively co-created the Wrocław avant-garde milieu for over five decades. She participated in some of the most important, groundbreaking events for Polish art, including the Wrocław ’70 Visual Arts Symposium, the SP. Conceptual Art exhibition (1970), the International Meeting of Artists, Scientists and Art Theorists in Osieki (1967) or Atelier 72 in Edinburgh (1972). The subsequent phases of her work both set the tone for changes in the field of Wrocław art and resonated with them. Although claiming that her oeuvre still needs to be “discovered” would be an overstatement, it is true that she had only eleven solo exhibitions during her lifetime and no individual presentations in the last decade.

Michałowska used various media in her artistic practice. She left behind dozens of paintings, drawings and photographs. However, in spite of this diversity, her work is consistent with her personality and attitude to life – the tendency to, on the one hand, disappear and hide her traces, and, on the other, to build herself up through art, not just through self-portraits, which she often created, but also by marking her presence in her art in different ways.

To illustrate this process, the exhibition Maria Michałowska: At the End of This Road I Might Find a Mirror features, in chronological order, the most important works from all periods of the artist’s career, beginning with painting, in particular the Vanishing Forms series that opened a several-year period in which Michałowska contemplated colour as a phenomenon. These contemplative or even meditative works come from a time when the artist focused primarily on this medium and did not “appear” in her art, creating abstract forms and no self-portraits.

Maria Michałowska (31 May 1925 – 1 September 2018) was born in Brzeżany (now Berezhany, Ukraine). From 1948 she was associated with Wrocław, where she studied at the State Higher School of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1957 under Prof. Eugeniusz Geppert and Prof. Stanisław Pękalski. From 1958, she worked as a teacher in the Department of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture at the Faculty of Architecture of Wrocław Polytechnic (from 1982, she held the position of an associate professor, in 1991 she received the title of professor). In 1965 she joined the Wrocław School (later – Wrocław Group), and after two years she took on the responsibilities of the group’s secretary, coordinating exhibitions organized outside Wrocław. She had around a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in many group exhibitions in Poland and abroad.

Curator: Marika Kuźmicz

Organisers: Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław, Museum of Architecture in Wrocław

This project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund and from the budget of the Self-Government of the Lower Silesian Region and of the City of Wrocław.

Collaboration on the part of the Culture and Art Centre in Wrocław: Agnieszka Chodysz-Foryś

Collaboration on the part of the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław: Małgorzata Devosges-Cuber

Visual identity and architecture of the exhibition: Łukasz Izert

Production: Misia Siennicka

The Marshal of the Lower Silesia Region took the honorary patronage of the event.

Patron: KGHM Polska Miedź S.A