Ein Augenblick. Grzegorz Gwiazda

Ein Augenblick

Ein Augenblick (from German “blink of an eye”) is an attempt to capture the continuity of our existence, to extend NOW a little longer, hence the forms of sculpture do not describe only the shapes of the figure, but also movement. The inspiration for this sculpture was a reflection on time contained in The Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann wonders there whether it is possible to tell pure time without additional content - he immediately answers himself, saying that it would be a task as absurd as trying to name an hour-long chord with music. “For storytelling is similar to music in that time fills it, completely fills it, divides it and makes it have some content and something happens in it… Time is as much a component of storytelling as it is of life - it is just as inseparably connected with it as bodies are in space.” These last words indicate the identity of sculpture and music. After all, a spatial object is revealed to us only in part - the rest is memory or mystery. Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz also noticed this similarity between the most material of arts - sculpture, and the most abstract - music: “Sculpture is something that is found at absolutely different ends and has everything in common with [music]”. On the one hand, we talk about sound mass and musical texture, i.e. the principle of combining melody, on the other hand - about the melodiousness of the line describing the solid. In addition, spatial form requires longer perception than image, because we must look at the sculptural realization from all sides. It is impossible to grasp the whole with one glance, because at least half remains covered. It takes time for things that were initially invisible to appear. Either we will only see significant parts of the realization, nourishing some premonitions earlier, or we will have in our memory what we have already seen. Sculpture has the potential for mystery, excitement of discovery and dissatisfaction arising from the fact that we cannot have the WHOLE in front of our eyes. In this sense, it reminds us of our life, in which we constantly turn to what was or what will be as a result forgetting that our life is like a blink of an eye and the only available reality is now.

Grzegorz Gwiazda

Grzegorz Gwiazda (b.1984)
Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań and Warsaw, scholarship holder at the Accademia de Belle di Brera in Milan. In 2009 he received a diploma with distinction in Prof. Adam Myjak's sculpture studio. Five years later, he defended his doctoral thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and received his habilitation there in 2019. Since 2010, he has worked at the M. Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education in Warsaw and since 2015 at the Barcelona Academy of Art. He is a two-time winner of the international figurative art competition Fundació de les Arts i els Artistes, awarded in 2018 by "Arteon" magazine. He presents his works, among others, in the permanent collection of the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern in Barcelona, where his extensive retrospective solo exhibition was held in 2017. He is the author of realizations in public space, including a four-and-a-half-meter sculpture based on the work Progression (bronze, 2017) for Chongqing (China) in collaboration with the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts.

Grzegorz Gwiazda is one of the most outstanding representatives of the young generation of Polish sculptors, he gives hope that sculpture as a segment of contemporary art has a chance to overcome the obvious crisis in which it has been plunged in recent years. And this, both in educational terms (few people today want to risk studying sculpture) and promotional terms (individually, it is impossible to bear the cost of materializing a sculptural concept on a promising scale). 
 

In 2023, the Museum of Art in Lodz purchased three works by the artist: Ein Augenblick, 2019/2023, (bronze, height ca. 200 cm), Shamefaced, 2015/2023 (bronze, height 200 cm) and Standing Otherwise, 2017 / 2023 (resin, height 150 cm). The acquisition of his works to the Museum expands the institution's collection with an example of recent Polish sculptural art, which represents a kind of return to the monumental and expressive potential of this technique.
 

 Subsidized by funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the state budget reserve