Filmoteka Muzeum

The presented documentation covers an important but frequently overlooked moment in the history of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, namely the time of the guest workshop of Prof. Marek Konieczny, which operated for only a year (from 1st March 1989 to 20th February 1990). The establishment of a studio run by outstanding artists from outside the Academy was one of the postulates of the students, who demanded profound reforms from the Academy authorities. The first visiting professor chosen by the students was Marek Konieczny – eccentric artist, who brought new quality to the fossilised Academy. “Signet rings, cigars, fine jackets, branded alcoholic beverages drunk in gilt crystal glasses, leaving shiny traces or a trail of golden dust behind”, as Łukasz Ronduda wrote, “spread around him a provocative aura of the uncanny, of a certain radically aesthetic art of living, which overshadowed art extracted from reality by means of the painting frame.” The never-codified programme of his workshop boiled down to the following: “A chain of individual initiations”. It was not painting that played the pivotal role, but the debates on the sofa brought to the studio for that purpose – revolving around the definition of art, its institutional entanglements or the position of an artist. The meetings were often attended by guests from outside the Academy, whose presence was supposed to open the students to different modes of thinking about art. The circle of Konieczny’s faithful disciples included, among others, Cezary Bodzianowski, Piotr Uklański and Jarosław Paluch.

References: Ł. Ronduda, Warpechowski, Konieczny, Uklański, Bodzianowski. Warpechowski, Dawicki, Warsaw–Łódź 2010.