KATARZYNA KOBRO COMPOSING SPACE

Prof. Marek Wieczorek

Saturday, 24 April, 2021 at 11AM (PT) on ZOOM

ABOUT THE LECTURE: Between 1925 and 1933, Polish sculptor Katarzyna Kobro made a series of groundbreaking abstract Spatial Compositions. ‘As it becomes united with space,’ she wrote about these works, ‘the new sculpture should be its most condensed and essential part.’ In this lecture we will trace the artist’s discovery that the ‘simplest and most appropriate’ solution to the question of the essence of sculpture was the ‘shaping of space’ itself.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Marek Wieczorek is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is a specialist on Mondrian and De Stijl and early 20th-century avant-garde art and culture with a focus on abstraction. His publications include texts on Mondrian, De Stijl, Georges Vantongerloo, Gerhard Richter, the Situationist International, and “bioart.” He has curated exhibitions in Europe and the US and worked on the traveling retrospective of Vantongerloo (Duisburg, Germany and The Hague, the Netherlands) and the exhibition of De Stijl at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Mondrian’s studios at Tate Liverpool. He wrote the entry on Katarzyna Kobro’s abstract sculptures for the exhibition catalog of “Une avant-garde polonaise – Katarzyna Kobro et Władysław Strzemiński,” which was held at the Centre Pompidou from October 2018 through January 2019.