In the 1990s Jadwiga Sawicka painted a series of works in which items of clothing — shoes, shirts, skirts — were taken out of context and placed against a uniform pastel background. Although clothing is usually seen as an expression of the owner’s identity and status, the artist stripped these items of any meaning. The clothes in her paintings are mundane; they are unattractive everyday objects, worn and tattered. As Sawicka said: ‘This is not something for me, this dress and these shoes are no good. A dull image of an unattractive reality. This means nothing, that explains nothing. Nil to nil.’ What distinguishes the sculpture Untitled (1999) from the aforementioned series is the technique used — this time, instead of a painterly representation, an object was created from plasticine produced at the Astra factory in Przemyśl. The artist was interested in the physical properties of the material, such as its softness, warmth, smell and characteristic muted colour. She used plasticine to mould something that lies between a body and its coat. The work is a study of the expressive possibilities of the material when contrasted with the conventional form of an object.