5 March – 6 June 2025
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sasza Blonder, Sandra Blow, Terry Frost, Doreen Heaton-Potworowska, Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Ivon Hitchens, Katarzyna Kobro, Peter Lanyon, Bob Law, Leopold Lewicki, Adam Marczyński, Margaret Mellis, Ben Nicholson, Victor Pasmore, Piotr Potworowski, William Scott, Władysław Strzemiński, Alfred Wallis, John Wells, Bryan Wynter, Keith Vaughan
The exhibition presents works by British artists associated with the milieu of St Ives, a small port town located in the westernmost part of the Cornish Peninsula in Great Britain. This milieu, bringing together artists such as Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Sandra Blow, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Margaret Mellis, William Scott, and Bryan Wynter, did not constitute a formal group whose activity would be defined by a uniform programme. It was here that a specific painting and sculpture idiom was developed, derived from the abstract structures of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson’s works, an idiom in which the choice of formal solutions is more or less closely correlated with the saturation and course of the experience of the landscape.
This exhibition emphasizes the performative dimension of a modern artwork, as being complementary to the formal one. The works gathered in the exhibition manifest a sharpened awareness of being in specific places. This determines the selection of artistic means, which, derived from proven modern art formulas, relate at the same time to the unique qualities of the landscape, and – most importantly – communicate the experience of being in it.
Modern art turned towards the landscape at moments of historical crises. In Polish art of the 1930s, landscape references can be seen as a kind of reaction to the economic turbulence of the period; because they triggered a model of perception that engaged in the processes of the environment, works from this period can be seen as an expression of the search for equilibrium, in both a physiological and social sense, in the uncertain conditions of the world at that time. In British art, landscape references intensified with the outbreak of the Second World War, reaching a culmination in the two decades that followed. There, the structures of the landscape provoked artists to redefine the tenets of abstract art, the principles of composition, and the nature of the artistic medium.
Artists associated with St Ives share a sensitivity to the unique qualities of the places in which they worked; the synthetic and processual aspects of painting and sculpture resulting from this attitude distinguish British art from the 1930s through the 1960s. These enter into an interesting resonance with the achievements of Polish artists of that period, in particular, the works of Sasza Blonder, Katarzyna Kobro, Leopold Lewicki, Władysław Strzemiński, and Adam Marczyński. The two milieus are linked by the work of Piotr Potworowski, whose sojourn in Poland in the years 1958–1962 was an opportunity to apply in the Polish context the ideas he developed in Great Britain, in an artistic dialogue with the British context. In the post-war period, the experience of landscape was considered by British artists as a catalyst for moral and social regeneration; it seems that the ecological dimension of the works showcased in this exhibition could play a similar role in the world today.
The St Ives and Elsewhere exhibition will be presented as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025 project organized by the British Council, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and the Polish Cultural Institute in London, and is also the opening event of the Season. The exhibition will feature 39 works from the British Council Arts Collection and 3 works from the Tate Collection along with works from the collections of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, the National Museum in Warsaw, the National Museum in Poznań, the National Museum in Krakow, the Częstochowa Museum, the National Museum in Gdańsk and private collections.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated bilingual catalogue containing essays by Michael Bird, Rachel R. Smith and Paweł Polit.
OPENING TIMES:
Monday: closed
Tuesday: 9.00am – 4.00pm
Wednesday – Sunday: 12.00 – 6.30pm
ms2
Ogrodowa
91-065 Łódź
Poland
Tel: +00 48 42 634 39 48
E-mail: ms2@msl.org.pl