Culture

Objects and Living Beings

The Universalist

The Universalist

— 6 min read
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Objects and Living Beings
"Pregnant Women" (1906) by Xawery Dunikowski, entrance staircase of Zachęta. Property of: the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at Królikarnia, a branch of the National Museum in Warsaw / PIOTR KOSIEWSKI

Why, in today's world of endless possibilities, would anyone still insist on being a sculptor?

By Piotr Kosiewski

The exhibition "Sculpture in Search of Place" at Warsaw's Zachęta has taken over the gallery's main exhibition halls, but also the staircase, and even the building's façade. The list of more than a hundred artists is an impressive one. It opens with Xawery Dunikowski. As Zbigniew Libera points out, he was "the first artist in Poland to make an art out of sculpture." Before him – in Dunikowski's own words – "it was as if there were nothing." In his works from the first decades of the 20th century, he posed the question of sculpture's place and of the boundaries imposed upon it.

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