Reviews

If the Snow Queen were looking for a tailor, she would turn to Marta Wojciechowska…
Marta Wojciechowska “cuts” and ‘sews’ glass with great skill. She designs and creates “creations” that testify to her enormous sensitivity, talent, and diligence. Marta loves transparent glass. Cracked like ice, crumpled like packed snow. Transparent or frothy…

In the small town of Żdżary near Tarnów, winter is white. Sharp and beautiful. And so is Marta Wojciechowska’s glass. But Wojciechowska also loves color. Dynamic, strong, bold. Just like her. She mixes colors with great skill and uncommon talent. Her platters, bowls, plates, and saucers surprise with their combinations of colors and patterns. Despite the repetitiveness of their shapes, they are absolutely unique.

Living in the wasteland, among forests and fields, requires great courage and fortitude. Especially when only three women live in a huge house: Marta with her mother and young daughter. The house was built by Marta. So was the atelier where she spends her nights designing and making her glassware.

Life handmade by Wojciechowska. Glass handmade by Wojciechowska…

Marta Wojciechowska avoids obvious (read: commercial) solutions. In fact, she has more of a sculptor’s than a designer’s qualities. Wojciechowska subjects glass to constant experimentation. On the one hand, she is searching for her own technological methods, and on the other, for original forms. The objects she creates are traces of the natural world, pulsating with quiet life; they are instruments that draw us into a subtle game. Distance, so common in the world of glass menagerie, is undesirable here. The vessels are shapes of solidified mass, and when you touch them, you get a feeling of weight.

Despite its fragile structure, the glass developed by Wojciechowska proves to be sufficiently durable to be used, for example, to create music [a good example of this is the concert-performance performed in 1998 in Bielsko-Biała]. Characteristic of her work is the use of combinations of glass with wood or stone. These elementary materials are left in their raw form so as not to lose the impression of simple beauty. Glass balls appeared in a massive trunk of a roughly hewn poplar tree; the popular Arabic game Mancala, made by Wojciechowska in a version that (I am sure) has no equivalent anywhere else in the world, is based on moving them “from hole to hole.”

Imagination is the playing field. On the stone board of the chessboard are the pieces and pawns of a one-of-a-kind chess set—their heads are the bowls of glasses whose contents should be noble and high-proof, just like the author’s inventiveness.

In the small town of Żdżary near Tarnów, in an enchanted place, lives Marta Wojciechowska. And this is where the beauty of her glasswork comes from. The proximity of forests means that the glass in her hands blends with wood in a harmonious, easy, and astonishing way, creating almost organic combinations. The materials intertwine, complement each other, and interact with each other.

Another material, as natural and rustic as wood, has also joined this story – stone. This combination almost symbolically emphasizes the diametric differences between the two: the fragility and “transience” of glass and the “eternal” durability of stone.
Added to all this is a wealth of forms, technical perfection, and passion, without which there can be no true art.

The exhibition in Krosno by this temperamental and immensely imaginative artist proves once again that glass has no limits in the hands of a creator who loves and understands it. The glass presented in the atmospheric interiors of the historic Piwnice Przedprożne (Porch Cellars) creates diverse, complementary entities that cannot be ignored. Our imagination and experience suggest associations and explanations that are sometimes obvious, and sometimes exotic and astonishing. We enter enchanted worlds, leaving the present and time behind. Combinations of glass with stone or wood, spatial formations with organic and geometric forms, ethereal clouds and heavy glass objects – could one wish for anything more?

This is art with a capital “A,” but at the same time it is familiar and friendly. The kind we would like to see around us. We instinctively find a place for a selected object in our home or office and already “feel” its positive, magnetic influence on the surroundings. It is therefore not surprising that we are reluctant to leave the exhibition.

When Marta Wojciechowska began ‘building’ her glass games over 20 years ago, she never imagined that dominoes, checkers, chess or pick-up sticks would become online games. That her game objects would be viewed like old shells accidentally unearthed during the construction of a motorway. That no one would know how to play Mikado, a skill-based party game similar to pick-up sticks… But Marta Wojciechowska’s games are not about functionality. What matters is form and beauty.

Wojciechowska combines glass and wood with great confidence. Rustic wood and transparent or frosted glass are not separate, independent entities. They are together, forming a harmonious unity…
In ‘alcohol chess’, the pieces are white and black goblets. After capturing an opponent’s piece, you must drink the contents of the goblet, which is filled with high-proof alcohol.

A graduate of the Ceramics and Glass Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, majoring in glass design.
For many years, the artist has been working mainly in the technique of fusing. She masterfully manipulates glass material, building her glass sculptures and installations with the lightness of paper, treating glass as one of many sculptural materials.

All her works have a common denominator: created in a studio surrounded by fields and forests in south-eastern Poland, they refer to nature with their simplicity.
One might say that nothing could be simpler, and yet, in its perfection, nature is sometimes unattainable…
Like the fairy-tale Snow Queen, she conjures up surprising objects from glass, birds frozen in flight, frozen wind, crystalline ice forms, snow blocks. A poetic winter landscape creeps in unnoticed, and the thought arises: is it glass or ice?

An affirmation of beauty and simplicity resulting from communing with nature, the purest and most sincere admiration for what already is. Crystal glass sculptures, often juxtaposed with simple, raw wood, delight and surprise with their fragility and lightness, especially in the center of a modern city.
I check, I touch, no, it’s not ice, it’s glass. ..

Marta is not a magician but an outstanding artist who shows us the way to beauty with great virtuosity and imagination, imitating what we often overlook: ordinary ice, broken glass…
The artist’s latest exhibition is another attempt to sensitize us to the fact that beauty already exists and we just need to be able to capture it.

Since Marta Wojciechowska graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, I have had the opportunity to view her artistic achievements several times, albeit sporadically. Each time, it was a great pleasure with an element of surprise.

Marta has created her own style and world of “glass imagination” full of ironic humor, surprising associations, and individual interpretations. Her objects and installations are a message that encourages the viewer to reflect on the reality that surrounds them.
In her works, she uses various glass forming techniques and often combines glass elements with her second favorite material—wood.

The exhibition “Glass Stories” at the BWA in Tarnów is dominated by installations—the form in which the artist feels most comfortable.
The multiplication of the elements used emphasizes the expressive power of the individual compositions, which, due to their multitude, fill the interior, spreading across the floor, walls, and space above the viewer. Three of them, “Puddles,” “Black,” and “Flytrap,” seem to form a homogeneous cycle.

“Oblivion,” in its perversity and with the aforementioned note of irony, will not allow BWA guests to forget this exhibition and its author for a long time.

Marta Wojciechowska was my student and, under my supervision, she completed a brilliant diploma in 1997, which, given its level, deserved to be awarded not a master’s degree, but a doctorate in art. I remember her as a rebellious, sullen warrior with the expression of Mała Mi.

She is a wonderful, expressive character, a creative, talented, stubborn, and consistent woman. I will never forget our inspiring conversations, which resulted in wonderful artistic solutions. Observing her work, I am very happy that fate brought us together on the path of her artistic development and that I have played a small part in it.

Marta surprises with her creative momentum, minimalist approach to glass as a material, and a way of thinking that has always broken with convention. The strength of her art lies in the original and powerful results of mundane actions performed on glass.

Marta Wojciechowska is an artist with boundless creative imagination. The excellent exhibition, the result of her work as part of the MKNDiS scholarship, is perfect proof of this. The five installations that make up this exhibition are a must-see and are sure to leave no one indifferent. And that is something extraordinary in today’s world.

Marta Wojciechowska’s work, regardless of the subject she touches upon at any given moment, is always full of elegant simplicity. It is based on subdued colors, using the richness of black and white nuances. Without unnecessary embellishments, without complicated metaphors, but always shrouded in a delicate mist of mystery. The power of the artist’s work reaches the viewer directly, thanks to the simplest means of expression and masterfully mastered fusing technique.

“I love making something out of nothing…” are the words of Marta Wojciechowska, which, in my opinion, perfectly define the nature of her work. Not all of us are able to appreciate small things, but she succeeds in doing so. Her artistic commentary on fleeting moments, associations, and observations is full of humor and cheerfulness.

Marta Wojciechowska’s work proves that there are no limits to what can be expressed in glass.