In the 1970s, Zofia Artymowska began to paint arrangements of a multiplied cylinder form in various colours and sizes. The surface of the cylinders is smooth and shiny, like polished metal. They give the impression they are part of a complicated mechanism. However, the artist was not making a reference to objects that exist in the external world. She attempts to render three-dimensional space on the flat surface of the canvas. Artymowska is not so much interested in the possibilities inherent in painterly material, as in the illusion of movement of the cylinders in the paintings. Art critic and historian Irena Jakimowicz wrote, ‘thus there are arrangements of parallel planes, clearly legible through the austere geometry of the openwork grids, there are treatments suggesting the movement of pulling inward or the bulging of surfaces within concentric arrangements, there are suggestions of rhythmic unidirectional undulations, and finally, there are more dynamic spiral forms’. These treatments result in the impression of a vast space. It is further enhanced by the possibility of manipulating the paintings — displaying them in various directions or, in the case of segmented pictures, creating new spatial expressions through variable combinations of elements.

Ewa Skolimowska, translated by Paulina Bożek