Teresa Jakubowska – Linocuts
20 September – 31 October 2010
The exhibition features twenty-something large-format linocuts by one of Poland’s leading graphic artists printed on Japanese tissue paper. The have been presented by the artist to the National Museum in Wrocław.
Teresa Jakubowska’s principal focus has been on existential concerns encoded in expressive graphic signs evoking multiple readings.The Corrida (1963) features a monumental figure of a black bull, shown frontally. The beast’s enormously large and sad eyes gaze at the blood-thirsty public, their faces deformed by terrible grimaces. The grotesque caricatures of the viewers enjoying the bloody spectacle are confronted with the animal’s agony. Place on the Top depicts a true rats’ race: people climbing a towering grid structure: those who have reached the top platform try to push each other out. For this bitter comment on incorrigible human nature, Jakubowska was honoured with the Brown Pin Award by the satirical magazine Szpilki (“Pins”) in the “best socio-political cartoon” category in 1966. The Halting, a linocut from 1971, features a winged figure trying to fly off – but in vain, as it is held captive and dragged down by deformed, vicious creatures weighting down its wings.
Teresa Jakubowska, an alumna of the Department of Fine Arts of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, became a member of the Toruń Group founded in 1958. The group’s programme focused on rejection of mediocrity, bourgeois aesthetic and academism of the art of the first postwar years. She was selected, together with Józef Gielniak, to represent the graphic arts in Poland at the Paris Biennale of Young Art in 1963.Over the years, Teresa Jakubowska has pursued the techniques of relief print, first of all linocut, favouring large formats printed on Japanese tissue paper. She explores the medium’s expressive potential with consistency which seems poignant and sometimes involves a measure of psychological exhibitionism in observing and experiencing the life going on around her.
