Ewa Zarzycka
EWA ZARZYCKA
Artist Saves the World, 2020, performance
My performance, Artist Saves the World, which I am preparing for the Zielona Góra Biennale, is a kind of oral history. A history in which – fortunately – I do not have to speak as an obtrusive “me,” nor even as the so called artistic individual. In this performance, I present my personal cosmos. A cosmos in which there speak the protagonists of this history, of this cosmos. These include the famous figure of my husband, a professor of Earth science, but also the mythical figure of an enlightened postman, the charismatic figure of a neighbour who writes theatre plays, an art-loving concierge, a philosopher who lives next door, or a newsagent who is a great humanist.
And I am one of the figures in all this. A lost artist who wants to save the world.
Ewa Zarzycka
Kazimierz Dolny, October 2020
– Ewa Zarzycka, Artist Saves the World, 2020, audio-performance (loop), courtesy of the artist
– Ewa Zarzycka, In a Process of Constant Corrections, 2020, drawings, 70 × 50 cm each, courtesy of the artist
Ewa Zarzycka (b. in Szczecin) lives and works in Lublin and Kazimierz Dolny. After graduating from the State High School of Fine Arts in Lublin, she studied 1973-1978 at the State Graduate School of Fine Arts (today the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts) in Wrocław. A conceptual artist, she works with performance art, including spoken performance, and with drawing as a way to record her writings, schematics, maps, or graphs; she is also an author of objects, videos, and installations. She staged her first performances in the early 1980s at Lublin’s Labirynt Gallery; her first solo show took place in 1991 at the BWA Galeria Grodzka in Lublin. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, art festivals, and art symposiums in Poland and abroad. She currently works in Department of Art Mediation at the Faculty of Painting and Sculpture of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, where she teaches a Performance course; she also co-curates and coordinates the Guest Lecture Open Studio – a series of meetings with artists, theoreticians, and curators.
Her works are held in the collections of the National Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Józef Robakowski’s Exchange Gallery, Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Andrzej Ciesielski’s “My Archive” Foundation, the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, or Zachęta Lublin, among other institutions.
Selected solo exhibitions:
Ewa Zarzycka. Years of Greatness, Lokal_30, Warsaw, 2015–2016,
Always Drohobych, Marta Shefter Gallery, Kraków, 2016
I’m Not Zofia Rydet, Galeria Studio, Warsaw, 2018