“Gardzienice” Centre for Theatre Practices is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Marek Leszczyński
The Opening: 27.08.2023, 3.00 p.m.
Palace of the Centre for Theatre Practices
“Gardzienice” (Gardzienice Pierwsze 3)
Curator of the exhibition: Zuzanna Zubek-Gańska
Light arrangement and installation: Włodzimierz Janowski
The exhibition will present works from various cycles; the works will include musical images as well as folk costumes.
Where did the artist get the idea for ‘Folk Costumes’ – a theme he took up over a decade ago and is still pursuing today? Anyone slightly familiar with Marek Leszczynski’s work will rightly point out that the theme is part of his fascination in folk culture.
However, let us ask the artist himself…
Several years ago, at the opening of an exhibition of ‘Folk Costumes’ in his hometown of Miedzyrzec, Marek Leszczyński admitted that the deepest sources of inspiration should be sought precisely there, at 7 Narutowicza Street, where he was born and lived for a quarter of a century.
There was a steam mill right near the house, and every Thursday at the market, the street was packed with horse-drawn carts from the neighbouring villages. The festive clothes of the newcomers tended to lose their original shine, something he was unaware of as a young boy. In the impoverished fifties, the women were only wearing relics of their former glory: striped skirts, aprons and headscarves, and sometimes a farmer’s dress was seen in the crowd. Complete costumes could only be seen during the Corpus Christi procession.
“At the time I treated them as something of a fairground,” Marek Leszczyński will recall. When, as a painter, he already had a certain ethnographic awareness, this childhood memory returned to him, allowing him to perceive in traditional clothing not only contrasts, but also rhythms, harmony.
“The idea for a series of abstract paintings operating with such means of expression as stripes differentiated by width, direction, colour, valence arose then. However, I abandoned this, moving towards the idealisations, stylisations and syntheses that had already been developed at the time.”
The first paintings depicting women’s folk costumes first debuted in 2013 in Wola Osowińska during the academic session ” There in the Podlasie region”, and two years later they captivated Chinese audiences at the National Art Museum in Beijing (NAMOC). Today, this painterly collection numbers thirty compositions and we hope to unveil more of them.
Dominika Leszczyńska
Marek Leszczyński – painter, pedagogue, regionalist, initiator of the Family Plein-Air, connected with Radzyń Podlaski since the seventies.
He was born in 1948 in Międzyrzec Podlaski. Graduated from the State Secondary School of Visual Arts in Nałęczów (1967), and in 1976 completed his diploma at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Mikołaj Kopernik University in Toruń. His paintings can be found in museums and private collections at home and abroad (including Denmark, France, Germany, USA, Canada). They also illustrate publications of a disseminative and poetic nature.