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Maria Kiesner
Two Houses - Modern Architectural Painting, Modernism Painting, Architecture Art

2018

About the Item

Born in 1976, graduated with a degree in Painting, under the mentorship of Professor J. Modzelewski, from the Fine Arts Academy in Warsaw. In 2009, Maria completed her Ph.D. in Art, titled 'The city before the Storm,' at the N. Copernicus Fine Art Academy in Torun. Between 2005 and 2007 she pursued a fellowship at the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in Warsaw. From 2008 her professional career pivoted when she became Associate Professor at the Maria Grzegorzewska College of Artistic Education in Warsaw, where she teaches painting and the methodology of teaching art, to this day. AWARDS, SCHOOLARSHIPS 2016 – The Grand Prix award in the Polish National Painting Competition Leon Wyczółkowski in Bydgoszcz 2016 – Award of the District Museum Leon Wyczółkowski in Bydgoszcz 2007 – Scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 2005 – Scholarship from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage 2002 – The Józef Szajna Award, Studio Gallery Architecture is Maria Kiesner’s artistic point of interest. Residences, blocks of flats, sport facilities. Modernism as an epoque and architecture style is what the artist, appreciates most. She finds herself “possessed” by it. She began to paint “the architecture of tomorrow” by the time when it already belonged to the past. Gone and mistreated, crushed, covered with rust, hidden behind the styrofoam. Now, suddenly rediscovered by researchers and modernism lovers, who brought it to life with their scientific works. We can be sure, Maria Kiesner’s painting was a trigger to this reincarnation. Even tough keeping out of public discussion on modernist architecture, artist`s works speak louder than voice. Artist focuses on a building itself, but also on its relations with a landscape. And we don’t know any longer is it a landscape with house or house in a space of a landscape. Surroundings flow through the building, green of the grass tucks in the mass. Floating clouds reflect in windows, or in the sky actually. Building plays main character, when we remove the grass, trees, and a sky. It becomes separate object in the space. Discovery of modernism was crucial for defining the subject of her painting. For years Maria Kiesner has been creating her personal inventory of Polish, Czech, German, Italian and American modernist architecture. In her pictures there are Silesian gas stations, functional housing estates by Montwiłł – Mirecki in Łódź, where Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński used to live, and beautiful villas – icons designed by masters like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius or Mies van der Rohe. It happens that an artist enters the house, paints furniture, stairs, railings. Yet, it is the outside, façade, mass of building that is most importand. So much for the subject because if we take a closer look, it turns out that in time this subject was only the pretext for further artistic and formal search. The starting point is always architecture but taken in different ways. In many paintings buildings look like cardboard scale models or sculptures in space (deliberations on building mass and its interplay with environment are of crucial importance here. That is why the artist studied so intensely spatial compositions by Katarzyna Kobro, whose works were a subject of a whole series of her pictures). No matter if painted buildings are set in realistic landscape or almost fly in empty space, when reduced to the sign they are just an attempt of escape from the literal. Le Corbusier speaks about architecture, Kiesner applies the same criteria to painting. Whether she is painting a construction site or a finished building, she is creating a picture. And because she wants to get rid of literal motifs, she reverses them juggles with them. She escapes from their functions and purpose. Deletes details to get more and more clear building mass to leave its essence. We may say that her ultimate goal is the initial architect’s idea. Example: painting depicting Bauhaus houses. These are the icons of modernism designed and made with detailed carefulness. Kiesner cleared them off railings, details, reduced to mass. She created new quality, new motif. On the one hand she loves modernism, on the other she takes it her own way. You may say she runs a permanent conversation with cultural and architectural heritage. There is respect in this discussion, but no servility, a joke happens and sense of humor.
  • Creator:
  • Creation Year:
    2018
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 43.31 in (110 cm)Width: 43.31 in (110 cm)Depth: 0.79 in (2 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Salzburg, AT
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU103537536032
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