Martwy język | Dead language

The art of Monika Krygier (1953- ) revolves around the fundamental attributes of painting: the interplay of colour and planes, the potential of light and texture, the relationship between abstraction and nature, rhythm and repetition. The artist makes careful use of the visual sign, organic shapes and a palette reduced to a few pure colours. Her art bears the imprint of the Łódź avant-garde, which in a way comes from her background. She grew up in a family of architects and artists. Her parents, Krystyna and Stefan Krygier, were students and friends of Władysław Strzemiński (1893-1952), who rejected all illusionism in painting and insisted that it should aim for the greatest possible union of forms with the plane of the picture. Later, Strzeminski made drawings in which his unist approach gave way to the marking of certain natural systems, such as landscape, and transposed his observations into a "painted body". Monika Krygier has developed her own formal language to translate her observations. She gives her paintings titles that suggest additional lines of interpretation. The dead language refers on the one hand to the iconic language of art, which consists of signs instead of words and can be deciphered by the discerning viewer, and on the other hand to the idea of the "end of art", which was repeatedly proclaimed in the second half of the 20th century. But as the American philosopher Arthur Danto (1924-2013) famously wrote, it is not art itself that has ended, but the way art is received and written about. What has ended is the narrative, not the object of the narrative. A dead language, then, does not mean that it does not exist, only that it functions in a limited space. The work from the series My Grammar, from which this painting is taken, was awarded the Art Critics' Prize at the 19. Festival of Polish Contemporary Painting in Szczecin in 2002. Marlena Chybowska-Butler